Macaroni cheese (English, Raffald 1769) Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Macaroni cheese, in its eighteenth-century English form, is boiled macaroni simmered with cream and butter rolled in flour, turned onto a plate, and finished with a covering of browned Parmesan. It appears in later eighteenth-century England, in a household manual written for middle-class families. The dish existed by 1769 at the latest; how much earlier it took shape is not known.

Its two main ingredients, macaroni (a dried pasta) and Parmesan, were both imported from Italy. Neither appears in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747.

The dish is written down in Elizabeth Raffald's household manual The Experienced English Housekeeper, published in Manchester in 1769, under the title "To dress Macaroni with Permasent Cheese." Four ounces of macaroni are boiled until tender and drained, then put in a pan with about a gill of cream and a lump of butter rolled in flour, and boiled for five minutes. The macaroni is turned onto a plate and covered all over with Parmesan. The cheese is browned, but the original says only "Permasent Cheese toasted," and does not make clear whether the cheese is toasted first and then laid on, or browned once it is on the macaroni. Because the dish soon goes cold, it is sent to table on a water plate, a plate kept warm with hot water. It did not go into the oven, and the cheese sat on top rather than melting into a sauce.

Thickening with butter rolled in flour was an ordinary method in English cookbooks of the time; Glasse's 1747 cookbook calls for it more than a hundred times. Béchamel is made differently: the flour is cooked in butter first and then thinned with milk.

The first documented English recipe for macaroni and cheese, so the story runs, is in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), some twenty years before Elizabeth Raffald's of 1769. Recipe blogs and similar sites have repeated it widely.

Yet read Glasse's first edition of 1747 from beginning to end, and neither macaroni nor Parmesan appears in it. What it does have is "Vermicella" (vermicelli): a method for making thin pasta at home, along with puddings and soups that use it. Feast & Fast, a food-history project of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, also reads Glasse's entry as a recipe for vermicelli. The claim that Glasse came first grew out of mistaking this vermicelli entry for a dish of macaroni with cheese.

The food historian Neil Buttery and the museum's project both name Raffald's 1769 recipe as the first in an English cookbook to pair macaroni with cheese. The recipe is sometimes presented as macaroni dressed in a béchamel-style cheese sauce and baked in the oven. But the original has no step that melts the cheese into a sauce, and none that bakes the dish in an oven. Buttery judges that the recipe has all the elements of modern macaroni cheese, and calls its sauce a "proto-béchamel," a forerunner of béchamel.

Further back, The Forme of Cury, the English royal cookbook compiled in 1390 by the cooks of Richard II, has makerouns: dough rolled thin and cut, boiled, and layered with cheese and butter. Buttery traces Raffald's dish back to this medieval one. Looking forward, opinion divides over the macaroni and cheese that took root in American homes. Some see it as carrying on this English line of pasta with cheese; others hold that it took shape as a dish in its own right on the American table. Where its origin belongs is not settled.