Macaroni & Cheese

This collection holds something like a dozen macaroni cheeses, and they do not agree with each other. Some build a roux. One sets with eggs. Two lean on a can of evaporated milk. One — the oldest and by far the most austere — uses no sauce whatsoever.

That disagreement is the most useful thing about them, because those are not four levels of effort. They are four different mechanisms for making a cheese sauce stay a sauce, which is the problem the cooking page sets up. Macaroni cheese is where that argument gets tested with real recipes.

🔴 First, the history, because it is wrong nearly everywhere

Thomas Jefferson did not invent macaroni and cheese and did not introduce macaroni to America. What is true is narrower and more interesting. He encountered the dish in Europe — he went to Paris as American Minister to France in 1784 — was taken with it, and had a macaroni mould shipped home to Monticello along with boxes of macaroni. He served it at the President’s House in 1802, which is where the “invented it” story comes from.

🔴 And the cooking at Monticello was done by James Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved chef, who had been trained in French cooking in Paris. The dish is routinely credited to the man who ate it and admired it, rather than the man who made it, whose name we actually know.

The recipe that the modern dish descends from is earlier and English: Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769 — a béchamel with cheddar (a Mornay, in French terms), stirred through macaroni, topped with Parmesan and baked until it browns. That is not an ancestor of the American dish. That is the American dish, sixty-odd years early.

And pasta-and-cheese baked together is older still, appearing in fourteenth-century cookbooks on both sides of the Alps — the Italian Liber de Coquina and the English Forme of Cury.

⭐ Which makes “who invented macaroni cheese” a badly-formed question. Pasta, cheese and heat is a convergence, not an invention. Raffald’s real contribution is the béchamel — that is, the starch mechanism — and that is a genuine technical step, not a first.

The industrial chapter is exact: Kraft’s Macaroni & Cheese Dinner arrived in 1937 and turned the dish into a convenience food, which is roughly when it stopped being a recipe and started being a default.

The four mechanisms, as they actually appear in this collection

1. Starch — the roux. James Beard’s Macaroni and Cheese is the clean statement of it: butter, flour, warmed milk, cheese. The starch thickens the water phase and keeps the fat droplets apart. This is Raffald’s line, unbroken since 1769.

Baked Macaroni and Cheese is a hybrid and worth noticing — it builds a roux and adds an egg, so it is belt-and-braces: a starch-thickened sauce that then also sets.

2. Egg — the custard. The Lady & Sons Macaroni and Cheese has three beaten eggs, sour cream and milk and no flour at all. This is the Southern baked tradition, and it is a genuinely different food: the egg coagulates and sets the whole dish into a sliceable custard rather than a sauce. If you have ever wondered why some baked macaroni cheese holds a square edge on the plate and some slumps, this is why — and neither is a mistake.

3. Emulsion — evaporated milk. Creamy Stovetop Mac and Cheese does it with a can. Extra casein, already partly denatured by in-can sterilisation, holds the emulsion without either starch or egg. No roux, no baking, done in one pan.

4. Nothing at all. Baked Macaroni and Cheese (Without Cream Sauce) — Recipe No. 211 from the U.S. Army’s TM 10-412 (1944), in the library. Its entire ingredient list is macaroni, salt, water and shredded cheese. Layer, bake, serve a hundred men.

⭐ That one is the most instructive recipe on this page, because it shows what the other three are buying. With no starch, no egg and no evaporated milk, there is nothing holding an emulsion — the cheese simply melts between layers of pasta and, being held by nothing, it will eventually break and go greasy if pushed. The Army did not care, and at 16 pounds of cheese to 20 pounds of macaroni it hardly matters. Every other recipe here is paying, in effort or in an added ingredient, for the sauce to stay a sauce.

There is a fifth route the collection also carries — Cheese Sauce, Sodium Citrate — which is the only one that addresses the cause rather than working around it.

⭐ Jeff’s own is the evaporated-milk route, and it is still open

Man and Cheese Jeff’s Experiment is his, it is filed A In Progress, and it is honestly full of question marks — 8 ounces? “Barrel” Pasta (Rigatoni?), 2 cans PET milk (OZ?), 1 Wedge Parmesan cheese (8 to 12 oz?). It is a working note, not a finished recipe, and it is published as one.

Mechanically it is squarely route 3: two cans of PET milk, no roux, no egg, cooked in one pan with the pasta so the starch the macaroni sheds does a little thickening on the way. Dry mustard dissolved first, nutmeg, Parmesan stirred in off the heat in batches. That is a sound design, and it is the same PET-milk instinct that turned out to verify in the breakfast section — the in-can sterilisation has already begun the Maillard reaction, so the milk brings cooked, faintly caramel notes that fresh milk does not.

🔴 One correction, and it is about the can

The note on it reads “From the Civil War times.” The dish shape may well be that old. The can is not.

The milk of the Civil War was Gail Borden’s sweetened condensed milk — patented August 1856, sold as Eagle Brand, and genuinely a field ration. Sweetened, because the sugar is what preserved it. Unsweetened evaporated milk is a later and separate invention: John Meyenberg took a US patent on steam-pressure sterilisation in 1884, and the Helvetia Milk Condensing Company began commercial production in June 1885 — the company that became PET.

⭐ So the gap is about thirty years, and it is not merely trivia. Sweetened condensed milk in this recipe would make a sweet sauce, which is a different dish. The reason the recipe works is precisely that the can is unsweetened and sterilised in-can — the thing that did not exist during the war it is named after.

So which one should you make?

Depends what you want it to be, which is the point of separating the mechanisms.

• A sauce that stays a sauce, baked, browned on top — the roux. Beard’s.
• Something you can cut into squares — the custard. The Lady & Sons.
• Fifteen minutes, one pan, no baking — evaporated milk. The stovetop one, or Jeff’s.
• A sauce made of nothing but cheese — citrate.

And the cheese itself: younger than instinct says. A twelve-month cheddar makes a better macaroni cheese than a two-year one, for the reasons on the cooking page, and grating it yourself matters more here than in almost any other dish.

Sources

• Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) — béchamel with cheddar, macaroni, Parmesan, baked; generally identified as the first modern macaroni-cheese recipe.
• Fourteenth-century pasta-and-cheese precedents in Liber de Coquina and Forme of Cury.
• Jefferson in Paris from 1784; macaroni mould and macaroni shipped to Monticello; served at the President’s House in 1802; the cooking done by his enslaved, French-trained chef James Hemings.
• Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner, 1937.
• Gail Borden’s sweetened condensed milk patented August 1856, an Eagle Brand Civil War field ration; Meyenberg’s US patent on steam-pressure sterilisation 1884; Helvetia Milk Condensing Company’s commercial unsweetened evaporated milk from June 1885 (later PET).
• TM 10-412 Army Recipes (War Department, 1944), Recipe No. 211 — in the library.