As someone who grew up in the Midwest - Indiana - a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup was always the preferred "comfort food" - good for cold, rainy, depressing days, while recovering from small tragedies or in the aftermath of big family fights - what-have-you. And in asking older relatives and acquaintances - older than me, I mean, and I was born in 1954 - it was the preferred comfort food for them, as well, whether they'd lived in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin or Minnesota, and as far back as the turn of the 20th Century. So I began wondering how this particular pairing came about, and how widely it was practiced and enjoyed.
While this article is interesting, its promised discussion of this combo's "origins" is minimal, fleeting, and I believe short-sighted. It suggests that it might have became popular during the Depression for reasons of household economy, or that it might have had roots in the Italian immigrant community.
https://shariblogs.com/the-origins-o...eese-sandwich/
Other articles that I've found also go into the invention of the grilled cheese sandwich as having been a "busy housewife" thing in the 1920s, but very little if anything about how a cheese sandwich, grilled or un-grilled, happened to have been paired with tomato soup.
I'd always assumed that it was just a Midwest thing, and that people in other parts of the country had their own and different comfort foods...but if the articles that I've been reading are to be believed, it's national.
Beyond that, I was watching an episode of 'Law & Order: U.K.' the other night - with the closed captioning on, believe me - and someone's mother was mentioned as having helped them to get over some childhood disappointment by giving them "a bowl of tomato soup and a Dairylea sandwich". (I looked it up, and Dairylea is a British brand of cheese.) No idea if they grill them up over there, but apparently this is far more than just an American phenomenon.