I’ve been unwell. Easter should be a time for eating chocolate rabbits, contemplating Christ’s death and resurrection, and maybe taking a trip to the coast. Instead, from Maundy Thursday onwards I was confined to my bed, with a fever, a tight dry sinusy headache, and a stack of readings for work.

Fortunately I have a wonderful wife who brought me cups of tea and possibly my favourite comfort food: Tomato soup and grilled cheese. And not home-made tomato soup, either. I made that mistake last week: I took some left-over plum tomatoes, an onion, a little coriander and a recipe from a blogger who perkily declared it to be the freshest, snappiest tomato soup you’ll ever taste, and it missed the spot by so much I almost wanted to cry.

When I was growing up my staple comfort foods were cheese on toast with tomato ketchup, beans and sausages (the Heinz beans with the eight tiny sausages inside, which somehow made the texture of the beans more rib-stickingly unctious), and vegetable soup (from a can, of course), smothered in grated cheddar cheese.

I still love any variation on the pork-and-beans theme, though nowadays I’m more likely to cook up some fancy chorizo sausage with a half-can of tomatoes and a can of butter beans. And canned soup just can’t be beat. But the best thing of all is grilled cheese. Even though I didn’t grow up with it, I’ve taken to it like a native (and, would you believe the coincidence, April is America’s National Grilled Cheese Month).

For any Brits who don’t know what grilled cheese is: It’s basically just a cheese sandwich fried in butter. It’s a little like a toasted sandwich, but again, the butter takes it to the next level, and the fact that it’s not pressed means it has a more open texture. I make it by taking a couple of slices of white sourdough bread, filling them with cheese, and placing them in a cast iron skillet, which is already warming on a low heat with a little oil and butter. Keep the heat very low. Yesterday I had the electric hob on ‘2′, turned my back for one minute, and my sandwich got sooty. So cook it as slowly as you can bear. The longer you take, the more the bread will disappear into a brown crispy outside, and a soft warm oozing interior.

If you think that eating cheese sandwiches fried in butter is not healthy, then you’re a joyless, life-hating puritan who’s completely missing the point. Sure, it probably doesn’t provide the recommended daily amount of anything much apart from cheese, and if you had it every day you’d probably turn into a doughy cheesy lump yourself, but this sandwich has done more for my health over the last week than any amount of western medicine. I think I just need one more and I’ll be all right.