Matt Preston delves into the delicious history of the jaffle (2024)

Toasties really all started with the allure of melting cheese. Back in the Middle Ages, cheese-loving Swiss cattle herders would carry cheese when they were up in the mountains, moving their herds between pastures. They’d angle their cut cheese by their campfires at night and, as the face of the cheese toasted, they’d scrape the melted cheese onto bread. By the 16th century, this was being made in homes, and would eventually become the Swiss national dish of raclette that we know today.

The allure of this dish spread; in the 18th century, toasting forks were created in the UK, having both prongs for toast and a bracket to hold cheese to the embers. However, it wasn’t until 100 years later that the French gave us the first real toastie – the croque monsieur – where a Gruyere-cheese-and-ham sandwich was cooked in a pan until the cheese melted and the bread turned golden. With descriptions surfacing in the 19th century (there is a rather delicious description in the La Revue Athlétique of 1891), it only really became popular once Michel Lunarca popped it on the menu in around 1911 at his Parisian bistro, Le Bel-Age, on the Boulevard des Capucines. The literal translation of croque monsieur is “crunchy man” – it earned Michel the nickname “cannibal” from his rivals.

Needless to say, the culinary rivalry between France and Italy sees this history challenged. Italians love to boast that they taught the French how to cook and eat with forks in the 16th century, when Catherine de Medici’s cooks and court arrived in France to marry the French kind. These Italians also claim that they invented the cheese toastie, too, pointing to a recipe from 1560 in Domenico Romoli’s cookbook and eating guide, La Singolar Dottrina. His instructions for this precursor of the panino – the panunto – that bread is toasted with a type of hard buffalo mozzarella (provatura) in a covered pan with butter, and fried until melted. It’s then sprinkled with rosewater, sugar and cinnamon. Pedants might call this a melt rather than a toastie, given the absence of the second slice of bread.

This also implies that the toastie predates the sandwich – if you believe, as English historians claim, that the sandwich was invented by the eponymous Earl in 1762 as a mid-cards snack.

The jump from the pan to a sealed, heated metal container for your “toast pies” started with the 19th-century US obsession with cast-iron baking dishes and waffle irons. Part of this trend were pie irons, pudgy-pie ovens and “Tonka Toasters”, which could be lined with buttered bread and filled to your heart’s content before turning over the fire until sealed and piping hot. The idea of a hinged metal plate that sandwiched and pressed together batter to make waffles or communion wafers over the fire is far older. Of the four recipes recorded in the Le Ménagier de Paris in 1393, one contains grated cheese in its centre. So, is this really the first toastie?

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The first true toasted sandwich maker wasn’t patented until 1925 in the US. The Tostwich was invented by Charles Champion. The Australian name “jaffle” for a toastie is thanks to a Bondi doctor from the Little Bay Hospital. Dr Earnest Smithers patented his jaffle iron in 1949 and – according to the Australian Food Timeline website – within a year, the likes of Edgell’s were advertising canned spag bol as a “new line for the jaffle iron”.

The story goes that Breville was distributing a Belgian version, but inconsistent supply saw the company creating its own. And if Australia was in love with jaffles, they fell head-over-heels when Breville launched its electric Snack’n’Sandwich Toaster in 1974. They sold 400,000 of them within the year. It soon became a similar hit in the UK and New Zealand. The genius here, however, were those metal ridges that sealed the jaffle at the edges, splitting them in two.

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