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

Macaroni cheese is a dish of boiled durum-wheat macaroni coated in a white sauce of butter, flour, and cream (a béchamel-style cheese sauce), dusted with Parmesan and baked in the oven. It appears, in later eighteenth-century England, in household manuals written for middle-class families.

The ingredients themselves were nothing new. Macaroni, and the cheese, butter, and flour of the sauce, were all everyday items in an English household of the day. What was new was the assembly: boiling the dried pasta well, dressing it in a separately made white sauce, cloaking it in cheese, and baking it firm. It was the settling of this sequence—above all the technique of the smooth white sauce worked up from butter, flour, and cream—that brought the modern form of macaroni cheese into being.

The person who set that form clearly on paper was Elizabeth Raffald, in her household manual The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769). It gives a method—macaroni dressed with cream, butter, and flour, dusted with Parmesan and baked—in which today's recipe can be read directly. Within a practical book addressed to the middle-class household kitchen, the dish was presented as home cooking.

The first person to write down macaroni cheese in English was Hannah Glasse, in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), some twenty years before Raffald—so the story has long run in recipe-writing blogs and elsewhere.

But open Glasse's first edition of 1747 and what is there is a recipe for 'Vermicella' (making thin pasta at home), not a macaroni dish dressed with cheese and baked. The Feast & Fast food-history project at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum also reads this entry of Glasse's as a method for homemade thin pasta, showing it to be a different thing from macaroni cheese. The claim that 'Glasse 1747 is the earliest written recipe' rests on mistaking Glasse's vermicelli entry for macaroni cheese.

The first record in English of the present form—dressed with cheese, dusted with Parmesan, and baked—is Raffald's 'To dress Macaroni with Permasent [Parmesan] Cheese' of 1769. The food historian Neil Buttery, too, judges that this recipe carries every element of modern macaroni cheese. With the primary recipe itself, the museum's food-history project, and a food historian's assessment all pointing to one place, Raffald 1769 stands as the English-language first appearance.

The dish also has older kin. The medieval English cookbook Forme of Cury (1390) already records makerouns, pasta joined with cheese, and Raffald's plate can be seen as that lineage brought to its modern form. From this English form, in turn, the dish crossed the Atlantic and was carried into American macaroni and cheese.