The dish is simple to prepare, involving at minimum a slice of bread and cheese. More often, added ingredients are placed into a filling mixture, which is prepared earlier. These ingredients typically include
onion,
Worcestershire sauce, and onion soup mix, though other fillings, such as crushed
pineapple or
sweet corn are also known. This filling mixture is prepared separately before being added to the bread. The bread is kept in a rolled shape either by breaking the crust so that the slice does not spring back into a flattened shape or by skewering the bread with toothpicks. The outer side of the roll is occasionally coated thinly in butter before toasting to add to the flavour and give the toasted roll a more golden appearance. Food researchers, notably Professor
Helen Leach of the
University of Otago, have identified three basic traditional styles of filling, with all known recipes seemingly a variant of these three. The first of these recipes developed as a spread in the 1920s, prior to the invention of cheese rolls, using a specific spicy Australia cheese,
Rex Cheese. Variants on this style of filling include the use of spicy or strong cheese with mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and even liqueurs such as
Kahlúa. A second basic recipe again used spicy cheese, but this time mixed with savoury ingredients such as onion, which was cooked in butter or milk, mixed with the cheese, then thickened with flour or cornflour. A third version is similar to the second, but uses pre-processed food items as major ingredients, most notably dried onion soup mix and evaporated milk. ==History==