Pear and vanilla make a really delicious duo, as I mentioned a few weeks ago when I posted the recipe for my niece Rachel’s Pear Torte.

Well, guess what?

Dagstani & Sons, a Very Fine Fruit Company just won a coveted Good Food Award for its Pear-Vanilla Preserves.

It’s not just that pear and vanilla are so good together. This award is given to manufacturers of foods that are “tasty, authentic and responsibly produced.”

That’s Dagstani & Sons.

Over the past year I’ve tried several of their jams and preserves and they are definitely not your ordinary jelly. Every one that I’ve tried booms with flavor. These jams are like fruit but not like the sticky, viscous “fruit spreads” you get in the supermarket. These slither softly over your tongue. Like dessert.

 It seems almost wasteful to use this stuff on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

But you can’t just go around eating jam out of the jar can you?

Or can you?

It’s what everyone in my family has been doing. Eating Dagstani jams by the spoonful.

No double dipping allowed.

Of course that didn’t stop me from using the jams on top of yogurt and ice cream. Or from experimenting with a variety of the varieties to see which flavor would be best on a grilled cheese sandwich.

The Pear-Vanilla turned out to be the perfect one.

You don’t want to overwhelm Dagstani & Sons Pear-Vanilla Preserves with a cheese that’s too strong. Some balance is required. So I used a very ordinary, mild, meltable cheese that would give the sandwich the right texture (Muenster, but Jack and Fontina are good too) and a few crumbles of blue-type cheese to give it some tang. Yum is all I can say.

Congrats to Raj Dagstani and his sons!

Grilled Muenster and Blue Cheese Sandwich with Pear-Vanilla Preserves

2 tablespoons Dagstani & Sons Pear-Vanilla Preserves

2 slices multigrain bread (or whole wheat)

1-1/2 to 2 ounces Muenster, Fontina or Jack cheese

2 tablespoons crumbled blue-type cheese

1 tablespoon butter

Spread one tablespoon of the preserves on one side of each slice of the bread. Place the Muenster cheese on top of one of the jam-spread slices, then top with the blue cheese. Cover the sandwich with the other slice. Melt half the butter in a saute pan (preferably nonstick) over medium heat. When the butter has melted and looks foamy, place the sandwich in the pan, cover and cook for about 2 minutes or until toasty brown. Lift the sandwich with a rigid spatula and add the remaining butter, let it melt and flip the sandwich into the pan. Cook for another 1-2 minutes or until the outside is crispy and golden brown and the cheese has melted. Makes one sandwich

Every few years I do a recipe purge. I go through my files and discard duplicates or recipes I don’t need a recipe for, like “applesauce” or recipes with ingredients I know I don’t like and thus will never cook (calves brains) and, increasingly over the years, recipes that are really really long and too much bother to read, let alone cook.

I also throw away recipes that I’ve cooked but weren’t great, which is why I no longer have the one for Aunt Alice’s Black Forest Cake recipe that I mentioned yesterday.

But I do keep some family treasured recipes such as my mother’s favorite Lime Jello Mold or such old fashioned favorites as quiche because even though they might not be popular right now, there’s always the hope that if they don’t get a chance for a re-run then at least I could write nostalgically about them. And of course there’s always the possibility that someone might call or email me to see if I have a recipe for, say, Tuna Casserole or Green Goddess Dressing.

So I was delighted when I looked in my cheese file and found I had kept an old recipe for Welsh Rabbit. You don’t hear much about Welsh Rabbit anymore. But when you think about it, the dish is more or less grilled cheese, just a little fancier and sometimes more adult (if you use ale or stout).

Here’s the recipe. Welsh Rabbit is a real treat on a lazy weekend afternoon. Good for lunch or even a vegetarian dinner (with a salad).

Welsh Rabbit

4 slices homestyle white bread

3 tablespoons butter

1 pound shredded cheddar cheese

1-1/2 teaspoon powdered mustard

pinch or two of cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, optional

1/2 cup flat ale, stout, beer or milk

2 large eggs, beaten

Preheat the oven broiler. Toast the bread until lightly browned and place in a baking dish. In the top part of a double boiler over simmering water, melt the butter, then add the cheese and cook for 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until the cheese has melted. Stir in the mustard, cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce. Gradually pour in the ale and stir until blended. Add the eggs and cook, stirring until the mixture has thickened slightly, about 2-3 minutes. Pour the melted cheese mixture over the bread slices. Place the baking dish under the broiler and cook briefly until the top has browned. Makes 4 pieces.

It finally dawned on me why my mother might have made toasted cheese sandwiches, not grilled cheese. I’m guessing it was because of rationing during World War II. There wasn’t a whole lot of butter to lavish on a sandwich, so she leaned to prepare the sandwich the way I described yesterday — slices of American cheese on top of white bread, toasted in the broiler.

To confirm my suspicions, I got out my handy 1942 antique version of The Good Housekeeping Cooking (complete with its “Wartime Supplement”) and sure enough, there are, on pages 524 and 525, recipes for “Toasted Sandwiches” and even “Toasted Cheese Sandwiches - New Style,” by which they mean a kind of Welsh Rabbit.

There are several variations on the standard Toasted Cheese, including a panfried version and also one for the broiler. Here are two. They’re from long ago but still sound good:

Toasted Cheese with Cream Cheese and Orange Marmalade

6 slices bread

cream cheese

1 tablespoon orange marmalade

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Spread the bread with the cream cheese, then the marmalade. Place on a rack and bake for 5 minutes “or until they have crusty toasty look on the underside.” Makes 6

Or this one (you can substitute soy bacon or tomato slices):

Toasted Cheese

bread slices (meaning white bread)

butter

American cheese

bacon (or use tomato slices)

Spread some butter on the bread slices. Cover with slices of American cheese. Lay 2 half slices of bacon top. Broil until cheese is melted and bacon is crisp, turning the bacon once. 

I didn’t taste a real, authentic grilled cheese sandwich until I was grown up. It’s hard to believe when I think about it, but I was fully in college when a friend asked me over and said he’d make a grilled cheese sandwich for me.

I was shocked when he slathered a piece of bread with what seemed like a whole stick of soft butter, put another huge lump of butter in a frying pan and then layered some yellow American cheese between the buttered bread and a plain slice. He fried the sandwich in the pan, covered, plain side down first, until both sides were toasty and the cheese was melted and oozing out of the sides.

Well, at least he got the cheese right.

My mother had always made grilled cheese in a toaster oven. And, in the days before toaster ovens, in the broiler. She put several slices of American cheese on one slice of white bread — NO BUTTER —and toasted it (or broiled it) open-face until the cheese was hot and melty. Sometimes giant air bubbles grew on the top of the cheese and if she waited a moment or so too long, they would burn and blacken and then break so that there were crumbles of tiny ashen cheese where the bubble used to be. When she went fancy on us she’d put a slice of tomato on top of the cheese before she cooked the sandwich.

Despite the deliciousness of my friend’s recipe, I reverted to the familiar when I made grilled cheese for my kids. White bread, open-face and toasted. It took less time, less work and of course, no butter, which made it healthier and less caloric, although you really can’t brag about healthy when you are cooking with white bread and American cheese. Fact is, this is the way we liked it.

So, this is the way I make it for my grandkids. Except now I use multi-grain bread. Until recently, when my grand daughter Nina, age 3-1/2, started eating lunch at school, I would bring her a cut up grilled cheese sandwich for lunch on our weekly visit.

Last week my daughter Meredith made Nina a real grilled cheese sandwich. She buttered the bread and melted butter in the pan, put one slice of bread in, dry side down, added cheese to the center, and so on, until it came out classic grilled cheese.

Here’s the report from headquarters: “Nina was. Appalled. She kept saying in that sassy tone that I was supposed to use the toaster. Grandma uses the toaster!”

She also told her mother that Grandma was a “better cooker” and that “if you keep making grilled cheese in a pan I will have to tell grandma next time she is here.”

To everyone out there, whatever age you are — I wish you grandchildren so you can treasure comments like that one.

For everyone out there, whatever your age, try “grilled cheese” the way my mother made it. Or continue with the classic, diner-style stuff. Whatever. Grilled Cheese is one of our most beloved culinary staples.

But you might also want to go out on a limb with the simple concept of grilled cheese. There are other cheeses, other kinds of bread. The bread-cheese combo is endless. Anyone who reads this blog and who knows me also knows that I like to experiment with recipes. Even grilled cheese. Even toasted cheese. Here’s a version from my book, Hip Kosher. 

Crisped Manchego Cheese Panini with Fig Jam

1 ciabatta or other crusty roll

1 tablespoon cream cheese

1-1/2 tablespoons fig jam

1 ounce Manchego (Gilboa) cheese, sliced

Slice the roll in half. Spread the bottom with the cream cheese first, then the jam. Top with the Manchego cheese slices. Cover with the other half of the roll. Preheat a non-stick saute pan or a cast iron skillet (or use a panini press if you have one) over medium heat. Place the sandwich in the pan, then place another pan on top and add a can of food or other weight to press the pan down firmly. Cook for 2-3 minutes per side or until the outside is crispy and the cheese has melted. Makes one sandwich