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Stir it up: Toasted cheese warms up cold winter nights

If you were stranded on a desert isle, what is the food you would most dream about? Chocolate? Ice cream? A slab of beef, grilled rare? For Ben Gunne, the fictional character who was “marooned three years agone” on Robert Louis Stevenson's “Treasure Island,” it was cheese.

“You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you now?” Gunne hungrily asks young Jim Hawkins, the hero of the tale, when the two first meet. Gunne has survived on wild goats and berries and oysters, but “Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly — and woke up again, and here I was.”

Cheese — toasted mostly — is indeed the stuff of dreams, and the reason why so many cultures rich in dairy have fabled versions of cheese served hot and melting: Think fondue and raclette and nachos.

Some, like the French, have institutionalized the toasted cheese sandwich, pairing it with ham and coating it with bechamel sauce for the delicious Croque Monsieur. This sandwich (which loosely translates as “Crunchy Mister”) originated as Parisian bar food around the turn of the 20th century, and was immortalized — along with the butter cakes known as madeleines — by none other than Marcel Proust. England has its grilled-cheese-and-ham “toasties,” which is called a “tosti” in the Netherlands.

In the United States, we dip the ham-and-cheese sandwich in an egg batter, fry it, and call it a “Monte Cristo.” Historians do not seem to know the origin of the name, but it will probably surprise no one that it is first thought to have been served, in the 1950s, in Southern California. It is often paired with a small side of jam for dipping.

A Vermont dairy company, the Cabot Creamery Cooperative, celebrates the dish with the “Ver-Monte Cristo.” Cabot, owned by the 1,200 New England and upstate New York farm families of the Agri-Mark Cooperative, produces a line of butter, yogurt, cottage cheese and sour cream, but is probably best known for its cheese, including its award-winning cheddar.

This recipe calls for sharp cheddar, but you can take your pick from mild to “seriously sharp”; it will all be good. Aside from the cheddar, the recipe declares its New England roots with the use of apples and, as a twist on jam, an optional drizzle of warm maple syrup.

This is a sandwich to dream of — a sandwich to answer Ben Gunne's dreams. A sandwich to eat by a roaring fire on a cold winter night. It simply proves what Avery Aames, author of “The Long Quiche Goodbye” and other books in the “Cheese Shop Mystery” series, once wrote:

“Life is great. Cheese makes it better.”

Ver-Monte Cristo

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