🖊 In defense of tuna melts

Tim Anderson explains why a fish and cheese combo isn’t as weird as some might think

Whenever I think about tuna melts, I always hear Gregg Wallace’s voice in my head, irately questioning the supposedly odd flavour combination at the heart of the dish. ‘Fish and cheese?!’ I hear him say, to an out-of-shot John Torode, nodding in agreement. ‘Will that really work?!’ It’s an objection I hear a lot, and I’ve never quite understood it. I mean, I guess fish and cheese aren’t the most obvious bedfellows from an ecological point of view. Fish comes from the sea, or lakes or rivers or whatever, and cheese comes from cows, which don’t live in the sea (can you make cheese from manatee milk? I wonder). They say what grows together goes together, and fish and cheese don’t grow together, ergo: the tuna melt is an abomination, an unholy affront to nature.

But hear me out: maybe it isn’t? I grew up in Wisconsin, famed for its dairy products, especially cheese, but also flanked by two of the Great Lakes, Michigan and Superior. These lakes, which really are as vast as many seas, are teeming with delicious fish, most of which are unknown here in the UK, and probably in most parts of the US as well. There are your large and small-mouth bass, your steelheads, your perch, your pike, your walleyes, your bluegills, and of course, your muskies: brutish, mercury-tainted apex predators, which were once so plentiful that they were caught en masse, dried out in the sun, and used as firewood to power steamships.