Makerouns (Forme of Cury, 1390) Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Around 1390, the cooks of Richard II compiled the English royal cookbook The Forme of Cury, and among its recipes is the dish known as makerouns. The method runs like this: roll the dough thin, cut it into pieces, and boil it well in water. Grate cheese, set it with butter beneath and above, and build the dish up like losyns. In the transcription Samuel Pegge published in 1780, the recipe is headed Macrows and reads: "Take and make a thynne foyle of dowh. and kerve it on peces, and cast hem on boillyng water & seeþ it wele. take chese and grate it and butter cast bynethen and above as losyns. and serue forth."

The loseyns it takes as its model is itself a cheese-pasta dish from the same roll. Flour is worked into a paste with water, rolled out as thin as paper, dried, and boiled in broth, then laid in dishes with grated cheese, two or three times over. On the roll the loseyns recipe comes first, and the makerouns recipe points back to it. But because the two stand side by side in the same roll, the text cannot tell us which dish came into being first.

Wheat dough and grateable cheese were long-established ingredients of the Old World, close at hand in the medieval court kitchen from early on. The cooks cut the dough, boiled it, and set grated cheese and butter beneath and above it. All that goes on the plate is dough, cheese and butter, built up in plain layers.

The setting is the court. It was the king's kitchen that recorded the dish, in a manuscript compiled under the influence of Continental cookbooks. Later English cooking would produce the macaroni cheese that Elizabeth Raffald wrote down in 1769, boiled macaroni simmered in cream with Parmesan laid over the top. Makerouns belongs to an early layer of the line that leads to that dish.

The name makerouns calls "macaroni" to mind. Yet the roll says only that thin dough is cut and boiled, and says nothing of a hollow, tubular shape. The macrouns of late-14th-century Middle English was likewise a dish of noodles layered with butter and cheese. Whatever the name suggests, what sits on the plate is a cheese-pasta of dough rolled thin and cut.

A recipe for hollow macaroni can be found in the 15th-century cookbook of Maestro Martino, the Libro de arte coquinaria. Dough is rolled into sticks as thin as a straw, an iron wire is laid along each one and rolled under both hands on a board, and when the wire is drawn out, the maccherone is left with a hole through its middle. The recipe is headed maccaroni siciliani, Sicilian macaroni. The same book's maccaroni romaneschi, Roman macaroni, is dough wrapped around a rod and cut into ribbons a little finger wide: even in the 15th century, the name maccaroni was not reserved for the hollow shape.

Where the word itself comes from is uncertain. Some tie maccheroni to maccare, "to crush"; others look to late Greek makaria, a food made from barley, or to the Greek makar, "blessed"; and old Italian also used the name for a dumpling, a gnocco.

It would also be hasty to call makerouns an English invention outright. In the early 14th century, the cookbook Liber de coquina, copied at the Angevin court of Naples, held a dish called de lasanis: leavened dough rolled thin, cut into squares, boiled in salted water and layered with grated cheese. Its date is roughly 1304 to 1314, some eighty years ahead of the English royal roll, The Forme of Cury. The Forme of Cury itself was compiled under the influence of Continental cookbooks, Liber de coquina among them.

What the roll describes is cut dough layered with cheese and butter, made after the model of loseyns. Set beside the earlier de lasanis of the Continental manuscript, makerouns looks less like a dish England created from scratch than one that belongs to a line of cheese-pasta first written down on the Continent.