It has little in common with anything I've made so far, but ticks a fair few boxes in the iSpy book of Victorian cooking cliches by instructing me to cook the macaroni, in a pan of milk and water, for 1½ to 1¾ hours, until "quite tender". It makes sense then, to turn to my trusty Mrs Beeton for a recipe, and she doesn't disappoint, with directions for macaroni "as usually served with the cheese course", as well as as distinctly less pleasant sounding sweet milk pudding made with the stuff. It's all very refined, down to the parmesan topping, but I miss the velvety texture of the plain white sauce, and find the onion too bullyingly dominant: macaroni cheese should be something one could happily eat in bed, should opportunity call, and alliums and pillows should never mix. Bolder still, they suggest chucking in some sliced onion or leeks, softened in a little butter, along with a small bunch of chopped chives along with the sauce and pasta. This means infusing the milk with a bay leaf and black pepper before making the white sauce, and then adding a mature Lancashire cheese, as well as a slug of double cream. The other is, that because "almost all the joy of eating Macaroni Cheese comes from its creamy sauce", it's worth "going to town" on the seasoning and an "assertively flavoured" cheese. A few pointers, they insist, "will help to make this familiar yet sometimes disappointing dish into superior comfort food." Photograph: Felicity CloakeĪfter pointing out that there's "very little to get wrong here", Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham deliver a googly in The Prawn Cocktail Years by calling for penne, rather than macaroni "because the cheese sauce is better able to flow inside this larger-sized pasta". Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham recipe macaroni cheese. Whatever its alleged southern-Italian roots, it's a dish which we can safely embrace as an Anglo-American classic, which means I can merrily throw all notions of "authenticity" to the wind, and simply go with whatever tastes best.įor the sake of my own sanity and waistline, however, I've decided to stick to plain macaroni and cheese here, rather than exploring any of the near infinite variations on the theme – you can try out Thai red curry mac and cheese on your own time. Guardian wine writer and cheese fiend Fiona Beckett was deluged with entries when she launched a mac and cheese competition on her website a couple of years ago. America boasts more than one restaurant serving nothing else. Marlene Spieler has written a whole book about the stuff. This, then, is my own personal mission of conversion. I have an inkling (best not explored) that it would occasionally put in an appearance in the school canteen, but it always puzzled me that, despite being largely made up of two of my very favourite ingredients, pasta and cheese, with no tomato to lend a spurious suggestion of health, I never took to the stuff. Search as I might, I can locate no fond memories of my mother serving up a bubbling bowl of the stuff on Sunday evenings, or even fobbing us off with the infamous Kraft version so beloved across the pond.
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