This is macaroni and cheese from 1791. We think of it as the quintessential comfort food but
this dish is over 500 years old. Where did it come from who was making it let's dig into the
origins of this comfort food. I love the history of macaroni and cheese it goes back over 500 years
it shows up in 14th century Italian cookery and it shows up in 14th century English cookbooks. That's
very very surprising let me try to read you this recipe it's 14th century so it's a little tough
but it says take and make a thin foil of dough and curve it on pieces and cast them on boiling
water and steep it well take cheese and Grate it and butter cast there upon and above as lozanges
or something like that serve forth It's probably something like cheese lasagna but you get the idea
it's pasta and cheese together and that's English cookery. When we get to the 18th century macaroni
itself not just pasta but macaroni shows up in English cookery and usually it's used not
as we would think of it as macaroni and cheese but in things like macaroni soup and sometimes
in other dishes where they add a little bit to it as a spice of something special but it starts to
show up as macaroni and cheese in about 1769 in Raffled's cookbook and the recipe we'll be using
is out of Frasier's cookbook which is a little bit more Scottish as a bit of a Scottish twist
in it and that's 1791. What happens when pasta gets and macaroni specifically gets to North
America and that's a great question Jefferson is in Europe during the late 18th century he's doing
diplomatic work and he's in France and he gets introduced into pasta and macaroni specifically
he loves it he wants to bring it home to America so he brings home the recipes and he even asks for
a macaroni machine not just to make pasta but to actually make tube macaroni in fact the way
it's made it probably even makes elbow macaroni which is hilarious he starts to cook this in
North America he even serves it at a state dinner and one of the people writes in a letter later on
he didn't like it so much it wasn't a big hit at least for that guy at the State Dinner macaroni
and cheese not so much. While macaroni and cheese wasn't a hit with Jefferson's guests it does enter
the American Cuisine just a little bit later 1824 Mary Randolph in her Virginia housewife
cookery book she has macaroni and cheese that's probably the point that actually gets popular.
Elizabeth Raffled's recipe in 1769 is a bit like we would expect macaroni and cheese but I wanted
something a little bit special so this recipe from 1791 is maybe like restaurant macaroni
and cheese "a dish of macaroni put a quarter of a pound of macaroni in a Mutchkin of milk Stir
It on the fire close til the milk is reduced and add to it half a Mutchkin a cream when the
macaroni is soft take it off grate a quarter of a pound of cheese season your macaroni with
a little white pepper and salt and put puff paste border around the edges of your plate
put pieces of butter on the bottom of the plate then some spoonfuls of macaroni then the grated
cheese then some butter repeat these layers until your ingredients are all in taking care
to have a good deal of cheese on the top with bits of butter overall bake it half an hour in
the oven". So this seems like a wonderful baked macaroni it's got lots of butter so
it has to be good right first step let's start boiling our macaroni in some milk.
When I'm interpreting this recipe it can sound like this macaroni gets boiled with the milk
until it's reduced I don't think that's what it actually means it does say when the macaroni is
soft take it off so it doesn't mean just keep going until the macaroni dissolves we have to
stop when it's at the proper consistency that still has a little bit of tooth left.
There's an interesting evolution of pasta that gets mentioned in the English cookery
in the 18th century it first starts off as vermicelli sometimes they're importing it
they're even talking about making vermicelli and then macaroni seems to start to come into these
recipes and generally it's called something like small tube they don't have all the fancy names of
pasta that we do today they just call it either vermicelli or just plain macaroni but we can kind
of see from how they talk about cooking it that it seems to be changing in its form. Now when we see
Jefferson's macaroni machine we can see by the way it's constructed that the macaroni little tubes as
they're made will come out and curve naturally so that macaroni machine wouldn't make just straight
tubes it would make little curved tubes elbow macaroni just like we would find in the store
today. So why do we want different forms of pasta really good question each one has a different
texture and a different way of holding the extra parts there's always something extra with pasta
isn't it at least there's butter and we have cheese in this case or different kinds of sauces
and each kind of shape is going to interact with those sauces in a different way so these little
tubes are going to be perfect for holding that cheese making little pockets of flavor.
When we're researching macaroni in the 18th century it can be very confusing because the
term is used for more than one thing sometimes it's talking about pasta but actually more often
it's talking about people the way they talk and the fashion what they're wearing there are people
that are macaronis they're called macaronis or they are part of the macaroni club and
it's not because they eat pasta it's because of how they talk and what they're wearing.
This is the perfect comfort food because we enjoy it today we're going to be cooking a dish that's
200 years old 225 years old and they were making almost the same thing 300 400 and 500 years ago.
Doesn't that look amazing it is gorgeous and the smells are incredible it came out of the
oven and it's bubbling underneath and you can just smell the flavors before you even try them
all that cheese all that butter a little bit of pepper in there I can't wait to try this. What
I'm expecting is this wonderful saltiness of the parmesan cheese along with the creaminess of the
butter and the cream that this pasta was boiled in so it should be a little softer and have a special
flavor to it compared to just boiled in water the crust should give us a little different texture
and soak up some of those special flavors here it is macaroni and cheese from 1791.
That is perfect the cheese is great and the texture is wonderful I was worried about
that so so good if you'd like another episode on comfort food watch this one.