Come On In. I'll Open a Can of Sandwiches.
Found Objects, Vol. 8: Campbell's Limited Edition Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup.
WHEN I WAS LITTLE — when a lot of Americans were little, I’d wager — my mother made me grilled cheese and tomato soup. Particularly on sick days.
I remember being curled up on the couch, congested, downing grilled cheese and tomato soup while squinting at “The Price Is Right” and “The Joker’s Wild” on a 15-inch color TV. I remember nursing myself on grilled cheese and tomato soup 1981 when I managed to get flu-bound, somehow, on both the day of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the day of Anwar Sadat’s actual assassination.
In those Instamatic days, “grilled cheese” was shorthand for grilled-cheese sandwiches. As in, the grilled cheese and the tomato soup were separate and distinct beings. But no longer. Now, grilled cheese and Campbell’s tomato soup has been supplemented by …
Campbell’s Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup.
Come with me, reader, on this brief, gimlet-eyed tour of a liquid mashup that would have astonished my Carter-administration younger self back in the days when the collision of chocolate and peanut butter was still being advanced as groundbreaking. This can of soup is something that by all rights should not occupy a spot on our mortal coil, yet most decidedly does.
One of the purposes of Unsorted but Significant is to poke around among the things and ideas that occupy the background noise of our everyday spaces and explore what they mean. I believe this mashing-up of the mundane and the grandiose holds some answers for us as we try to make sense of the world around us. I am drawn, in particular, to impostors — things in our landscape that are trying mightily to be other things, and what that means about them and about us.
Which leads us smack to a can of Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup.
WE BEGIN WITH the packaging, because how can you not? The can identifies its contents (and maybe its label, too) as a “Limited Edition.” Edition suggests editing (so saith the editor), but use of the word has broadened of late to be a product amplifier — anything that’s limited, whether naturally or through artificial scarcity (Exhibit A: The McRib).
We look on the side of the can and learn that ingredients include: “less than 2% of cheese paste (Monterey Jack, cheddar, and surface-ripened, semisoft cheese).”
The full name of this endeavor is actually Campbell's Limited Edition Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup. The top of the can, the upper half, is gold but not quite gold. It's that deep, custardy-yet-mustardy yellow-orange of processed American cheese slices in 1973. The bottom half of the can is a muted tomato red with a Helvetica-like typeface that spells out the limited edition part. Campbell’s, while still keenly adhering to the foundational notes of their time-honored can branding, knows the comfort power of these colors together. That’s clear from the design of their website:
In the middle of the can is a picture of the garden-variety American grilled cheese sandwich we know and love, its tops toasted, cut in half diagonally, being pulled apart by invisible hands to showcase the gooey cheese and to make sure you, the soup eater, are clear about what is being simulated here.
“Is Campbell’s Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup going to be good for anything besides post-wisdom-tooth-removal-craving fulfillment? Will it fall into that little-explored sweet spot between tomato and broccoli cheddar? Or will this stuff simply be, in the words of Adam Driver, ‘good soup’?” Jessica Block wrote in Sporked last year when the elixir had just been released to a probably-not-waiting world. (She copped to being “slightly worried about sandwich lumps” in the soup at first.)
So let's have a taste.
It is definitely tomato soup. Decent tomato soup. No surprise there. Further details below from Subject A, aka this writer:
LOW MARKS ON THE WENSLEYDALE SCALE. It finishes with a definite … what? I don't even know if you know if you could call it a taste of cheese. It's almost a feeling of cheese nearby. It's as if cheese has been canvassing the neighborhood and is now hiding just around the corner, peeking in occasionally but never quite entering the room. It’s just enough suggestive hinting of cheese — maybe “cheese” is the better orthography — to then alert you to the viscous quality that is clearly trying to whisper it over toward the general textural direction of melted Kraft Singles. “You’ll enjoy the toasty, cheesy notes of a grilled cheese combined with Campbell’s Tomato Soup in each and every spoonful,” the soup’s site tells me. I’m not there yet, though the version made with a can of milk rather than water takes me a quarter-step closer.
MIXED RESULTS ON THE HEINZ-VALVOLINE VISCOSITY SPECTRUM. But the viscosity is not really tangible. On a scale of water to bread, the texture and the viscosity are a few notches shy of low-end motor oil. (Note that I'm not aiming to insult it by comparing it to motor oil. I'm simply looking for texture that we might expect of something that has to simulate, or at least vaguely evoke, tomato, cheese and somewhat crunchy toasted and buttered bread all at once in a can.) I realize I should have put croutons in the bowl for some sort of contrasting mouth feel.
JURY REMAINS OUT ON THE ‘WHY DOES THIS EXIST’ CONTINUUM. This is where we've gotten to, isn't it? First we have the thing itself. Then we have the simulation of the thing. Now, though, you're simulating not just something else but a BUNCH of something elses, all thrown together. And those something elses might not even be the something elses they purport to be; they may be lab-tested simulations to make you feel you have all those something elses in your mouth at once. When, in the end, it’s simply tomato soup. It’s really, as they say, something else.
As canned tomato soup, it was good. But I did not depart the table feeling like I had consumed real or even fake grilled cheese. If a grilled-cheese sandwich was Xeroxed™, and then the Xerox™ was Xeroxed™ and so on and so forth for 10 cycles, this is what might emerge. I get more “grilled cheese” experience from the can’s design than I do to the soup inside.
Such are the perils of trying to simulate many things at once inside a can. Obviously, you couldn't make soup that eats like a sandwich, because then it would be, well, you know, a sandwich. But I do think we are inching down a path toward the magic gum that Violet Beauregarde famously received from Willie Wonka — an entire meal in a piece of gum that, not incidentally, included tomato soup before it moved on to the fabled blueberries that sent her horribly astray.
AUDIENCE MOTIVATIONS. Why do people want something like this? What, I wonder, was seen as the market demand? Gen X people like me, I’m sure. Hey, here I am spending all this time on it!
I acknowledge that it's comforting. But it's comforting in ways that are ancillary to the core product. It is comforting because the can I'm sitting here holding has colors that just ... sort of speak to early Gen-X me in the way that Bonne Bell Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers spoke to girls my age and paint colors with immersive names (“Beachside Drive,” “Flirt Alert,” “Dandelion Wish”) sometimes beckon to suburban Gen Xers. The colors on this soup can insist that I am 8 and home sick and Mom is helping me get better by taking care of me with Colorforms and “The Electric Company” and wonderfully processed 1970s food from a Campbell’s Soup can and the melty square products of an extrusion of processed cheese somewhere in a distant Kraft Singles factory.
Familiarity is comfort. Whether it’s pre-distressed ball caps that feel like they were broken in decades ago or air fresheners designed to make your not-new car smell new, comfort propels so many of our buying habits. And in Campbell’s Soupland, home to millions of stories of American kids like me who got sick-day solace out of a can long ago, comfort is deliciousness. What’s more, this odd soup itself is, in fact, comforting when heated up. Yet it is comforting not in a grilled cheese and tomato soup kind of way, but simply in a plain old tomato soup kind of way.
Here’s a notion, though: Maybe that’s enough. Maybe, just maybe, one thing done well is actually better than two or three at once.
I think I'll make myself an actual grilled cheese tomorrow — with bread and cheese, to be clear — so at least this whole excursion has inspired me in that direction. Which is redundant. But also, in this confusing world of fragments and mashups, is very much not. For now, at least, a sandwich is still a sandwich.
Next time you're sick have pastina in brodo instead. My nonna would highly recommend it.
Fun yarn, Ted!
"This is the best pizza in a cup."
-- Steve Martin, 1979