It's interesting how something like this can really bring back certain memories. It's also interesting how something that's such a routine part of our daily life tends to be associated by us with the recent, in a way.Hundred-year-old Directions for Cooking Macaroni
Macaroni was a staple of my childhood life. But not the horrid stuff you get out of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese box. Ack.
Now, as I've mentioned here before, my mother was a terrible cook. But I guess Mac & Cheese is hard to mess up, unless of course you include the boxed Kraft stuff, which is really disgusting. Anyhow, as a kid everyone ate Mac & Cheese but the funny thing is that I don't recall the boxed stuff even existing. Maybe it did but she didn't fix it.
In recalling something like this, particularly for people who are Catholics such as myself, its tempting to associate Mac & Cheese with Lent or, if you are old enough, Fridays in general. For folks who don't know, Catholics and the Orthodox abstain from meat on the Fridays of Lent. The Orthodox fasting regulations, and those of the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, are actually much more extensive than that, and I'd have to look them up to recall what they are. Prior to some date in the 1960s American Catholics had to abstain from meat on every Friday of the year except for certain feast days.
Anyhow, while that's a popular thing to say, that wasn't the case in our house. My mom was simply a poor cook but Mac & Cheese is really easy and she made it frequently as a side dish. It was never ever the main dish, ever. In Lent, if we had it, it was the side dish to fish.
Anyhow, we had Mac & Cheese as a side dish pretty frequently and I always liked it, and I still do (but not that icky Kraft stuff).
My mother made Mac & Cheese using Velveeta, which isn't even really cheese but a "processed cheese food", whatever that this. Now, I can't stand Velveeta and it doesn't seem to be used as much now, but it was the only cheese, other than cream cheese, she bought. I would never make Mac & Cheese with Velveeta now, but it was as super common cheese in almost everyone's household when I was a kid. Every mother had Velveeta. If we had cheese sandwiches, they were made from Velveeta.
Anyhow, I can readily recall my mother's Mac & Cheese and how much I liked it, particularity when she put it in a casserole dish and baked it, which was frequently. But for the post on A Hundred Years Ago, however, I would not have recalled that. The oddity of this is that my mother fell quite ill when I was 13 years old or so and my father took over the cooking after that, so in recalling this, it's also the case that I'm recalling now something that I haven't had, by her hands, for 42 years. Quite awhile.
After my father took over cooking Mac & Cheese basically went away. He had learned how to cook from his mother and was a very good cook. The cessation of my mother cooking was a revelation as the quality of the food improved so much. Velveeta also went away in favor of real cheese. That may sound minor, but my mother even used Velveeta for things like tacos, which is not good.
Anyhow, after growing up I'd make Mac & Cheese for myself, but with real cheese, and I really like it. I'll still do that for lunch on occasion. But never that Kraft box stuff, which is disgusting.
My wife and kids feel differently about the gross Kraft pre packaged item, and they'll make it. I just can't stand it and can't figure why anyone would ever eat it, but then I've also been surprised by the fact that this very pedestrian food has somehow achieved celebrity status. To my surprise you can now find Mac & Cheese in lots of restaurants, particularly of the brew pub or ale house variety. As I like that sort of fare, it's been a surprise to me. And some of it has even gotten pretty fancy. I'll never order it from a menu myself, as it seems like something I could do just as well as anybody else, but I've seen it ordered a pile of times and I'll admit, it looks pretty good.
Probably because of its American staple nature, Mac & Cheese has sort of a 1950s June and Ward Cleaver feel to it, which is how I think a lot of Americans view it. An interesting thing about the item on A Hundred Years ago is that it shows that this has been around a lot longer than that, and that it's actually changed somewhat. For example, I thought that all Macaroni was elbow macaroni, but that's not true at all. There used to be a time, it turns out, when it was a series of rods you had to break.
What would probably be a bigger surprise to most people is that its been an American staple for over two centuries. The line about Macaroni, while satirical and somewhat referring to something else, that appears in the Revolutionary War era song Yankee Doodle, was in fact a familiar reference. Macaroni & Cheese was a common dish in the Americas at the time.
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Which is interesting for a variety of reasons. Not only is this not something that became common in the boxed food era, or even a recently as a century ago. . . it's been around on the American dinner table for a long time.
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