My grandparents' legacy

All I wanted was the Toas-Tite sandwich maker and the secret to joy.

By Stephen J. Lyons

Dec 12, 2000 | When my grandfather passed away I told my mother I wanted just one treasure from my grandparents' estate: the Toas-Tite sandwich maker. I'm sure I was the only grandchild to make this request. While sorting through half a century of my grandparents' belongings, my mother eventually unearthed my inheritance. On that day I became a rich man.

Almost 16 inches long, with a round four-and-three-quarter-inch sandwich holder at the end, this kitchen collectible was the wellspring of hundreds of perfectly circular grilled cheese sandwiches made by my grandmother in her Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home. Manufactured sometime in the 1940s by Bar-B-Bun Inc. of Cincinnati, the Toas-Tite has two black wooden handles held together with a metal loop on the end to keep them closed and, well, tight. The face of an almost hysterically smiling woman adorned the cover of the manufacturer's original box. Next to the happy chef was a sales pitch: "Make a luscious sealed in hot drip prof [sic] toasted sandwich." "Prof" stood for "proof," I imagine, and "hot drip" meant lots of saturated fat.

The beauty behind Toas-Tite's unique design was that it allowed the user to make grilled cheese sandwiches, toast and hamburgers over an outdoor campfire or, in my case, over a gas flame in Grandmother's kitchen. You buttered two slices of bread, fitted them into the Toas-Tite, placed thick wedges of Velveeta inside, closed the Toast-Tite, looped the ring around and then cut off the excess edges of bread. As the sandwich cooked over an open flame, circular rings from the aluminum casing pressed into the bread, giving the finished sandwich the look of a flying saucer.

Spiral designs on food were magical to a young kid from the South Side of Chicago with his head in the clouds. Each year, my mother, exhausted from the rigors of single parenting in third-story walk-ups, would ship my brother and me off to Iowa for the summer on the Empire Builder, a train with exotic destinations like the Rocky Mountains, Seattle and Portland, Ore. We only got as far as the pastoral hills of eastern Iowa, where my grandfather would be waiting, a tall, gruff man with a flattop haircut and a half-lit cigar rolling around his lips. He was a man of few words; he could neither read nor write, with the exception of penning his name on the back of paychecks from the city bus garage, where he had toiled for 30 years. Still, like so many men and women of his generation, he was bilingual, able to converse in English and in Czech. He used the latter most often when speaking on subjects not fit for our tender, monolingual ears.

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