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

In 1390, the cooks of Richard II set down a dish called makerouns in the English royal cookbook The Forme of Cury. The method runs like this: roll the dough thin, cut it into pieces, and boil it well in water. Then grate cheese, and lay butter beneath and above it, building the dish up in layers like losyns (the medieval lasagne-style layered dish). The Middle English original reads: "Take and make a thynne foyle of dowh and kerve it on pieces, and cast hem on boiling water & seeth it well. take cheese and grate it and butter cast bynethen and above as losyns."

Wheat dough and grateable cheese were both long-established ingredients of the Old World, at home in the medieval court kitchen from early on. What gives the dish its shape is the handwork of the period: boiling and cutting the dough, then building it up in layers of cheese and butter. The bechamel (white sauce) that later English macaroni cheese would carry has not yet appeared here. What we have instead is something plainer, layered from cheese and butter alone.

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. Makerouns sits at the oldest layer of the line that would lead to the later English bechamel-based macaroni cheese, the form Elizabeth Raffald would write down in 1769.

The spelling makerouns calls "macaroni" to mind. But there is no tubular dried pasta in this dish, none of what we picture today. Tubular pasta appears only in the 15th century, in the time of Maestro Martino. The makerouns of 1390 is, in substance, dough rolled thin and cut, closer to vermicelli. Trace the etymology and maccheroni first meant gnocchi, dumplings of pressed dough, going back to maccare, to crush. The name hints at tubes of pasta, yet what sits on the plate is a cheese-pasta of cut dough. This gap between name and substance is the key to reading makerouns.

It is also too quick to call the dish an English invention. In the early 14th century, the cookbook Liber de coquina, copied at the Angevin court of Naples, held a dish called de lasanis: pasta cut into squares and layered with grated cheese. Its date is roughly 1304 to 1314, some eighty years ahead of The Forme of Cury. This way of building cheese and pasta into layers already existed on the Continent, and it reached England along the current of court manuscripts. The Forme of Cury itself stands under the influence of Continental cookbooks, Liber de coquina among them.

The primary text, the trail of the etymology, the earlier Continental manuscript: all point the same way. Makerouns is the oldest surviving cheese-pasta in the English-speaking world, yet it is not an English invention. It is the medieval European cheese-pasta appearing on English soil.