Quarrelsome cooks! Pernickety portion-controllers! Gimlet-eyed gastronomes! Your attention, please. It is time for How to Eat to hand down its verdict on the transcendent comfort food, macaroni cheese.
Please note, we will refer to it as “macaroni cheese” throughout – not mac, not mac ‘n’ cheese, not crack ‘n’ cheese, in a stand against the constant renaming of foods in order to fuel the gastro-industrial complex and its appetite for novelty. In the UK, the reinvention of macaroni cheese as the spuriously hip mac ‘n’ cheese illustrates how juvenile and creatively spent our food culture is. Molecular gastronomy was a genuine paradigm shift for restaurant food; slopping pulled pork on macaroni cheese is barely doodling in the margins of history.
Below the line, as ever, we offer a penne for your thoughts. But please, think before you post. By all means, grill your fellow contributors, but no going off half-baked, no salty language and, of course, no cheesy puns.
Where?
Before you can discuss the how of macaroni cheese you must define your terms. You must establish when and where it is acceptable. You have to assert what it is.
Macaroni cheese is now often described as street food. It is not. People may sell it from stalls and vans (although its resurgence is part of a far broader rise in “dude food”), but if we accept that this is a dish whose primary attraction is effortlessness, who wants to eat it from a Styrofoam container or a cardboard tray, while standing in the cold? Where is the comfort in that?
It is not a restaurant dish, either. Just as the Man v Food generation felt it necessary to pimp (eugh!) and fiddle with macaroni cheese – not to improve it, but to justify their own existence – so, too, chefs are incapable of serving a straight version of this essentially domestic dish. They make endless additions from lobster to butternut squash, over-complicating the dish without finding any interesting new angles of attack (one exception is Hawksmoor’s glorious shortrib macaroni).
Fundamentally, macaroni cheese is a simple dish. In terms of its textures and flavours, it should be a gently layered mouthful of creamy, spoonable pleasure that demands nothing more than you relax, sit back and enjoy it. This is a dish for the home. This is a dish for exhausted midweek nights, when you want to spend 30 minutes in the kitchen decompressing, before flopping down in front of Coronation Street. There may be restaurants in America that sell only macaroni cheese, but they certainly won’t be showing ITV.
When?
Apparently, actor Mark Wahlberg likes macaroni cheese for breakfast. Which is, erm, maverick. Likewise, HTE is taken aback by the idea that lunchtime sales of macaroni cheese have been a significant factor in Pret A Manger’s recent increased sales. If this is true, is UK productivity slumping alarmingly between 3pm and 4pm as we collectively suffer a mid-afternoon carb crash? In HTE’s experience, eating macaroni cheese at lunch would mean mainlining caffeine to make it through to 5pm. That is another reason why it is preferable to eat macaroni cheese at home in the evening– you have a selection of familiar soft-furnishingson which to slump afterwards.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall refers to macaroni cheese as a “high-tea treat”. Due to How to Eat’s humble origins in the north of England, it has no idea what this means. Is high-tea “yer tea”, as it would be understood in Rochdale or Ramsbottom?
Preparation
In its purest form, in perhaps its highest expression, macaroni cheese requires no more than al dente pasta (macaroni or penne, rigatoni is too big); a white sauce spiked with mustard and flavoured with mature cheddar and a little gruyere or Lincolnshire Poacher (Lancashire cheese is too tart and often melts oddly; mozzarella is too oily and stringy); and a topping of parmesan and breadcrumbs. There, you have everything you need: crunchiness, slippery pasta with a residual bite, a luxuriously unctuous sauce, logically interlocking layers of salty, cheesy savouriness and, in the background, a hint of heat to stop it becoming too overbearingly rich.
In the name of variety, you might add a few sweet leeks or, to provide a hot and/or meaty counterpoint, smoked bacon, chorizo or spicy ground pork. But really, the list of acceptable additions is so short as to be barely worth mentioning.
Unacceptable additions
But will the world leave it there? Will it accept the perfection of this dish? No. Like an anthemic 1990s house tune given the full double-pack 12-in remix treatment, cooks keep tinkering with macaroni cheese, oblivious to the way that, with their metaphorical dubs and bonus beats, they are frittering away the magic of the original.
Most of the bullying base seasonings used (garlic, cayenne, chilli, anchovies) take this dish in a challenging direction it was never meant to go in. It is not meant to be a complex enigma. It is not meant to taste primarily of nutmeg. Herbs are also verboten. Finishing it with everything from pine nuts to pumpkin seeds is an entirely unnecessary attempt to reinvent the wheel (or breadcrumb). Topping it with sad, shriveled slices of grilled tomato is also unacceptably retro.
People will insist on putting vegetables in there, too: sweet potato, mushrooms (!), peas, broccoli, kale. But what you have there is a pasta bake; an increasingly worthy and healthy pasta bake, that sacrifices comfort in favour of vitamins, fibre and unwelcome textural variations. As for the reductive logic that sees people merge cauliflower cheese and macaroni cheese, all that does is ruin two incredible dishes.
There is, likewise, no requirement for a protein here, least of all a woolly mound of pulled pork or gelatinous strands of ham hock that require you to chew, rather than essentially slurp it down. Using lobster and crab meat in macaroni cheese, in an attempt to take it upmarket, is a heinous waste of both. Particularly when the macaroni cheese is then slathered in that thunking fungal effluent, truffle oil.
Serving
Macaroni cheese is not a side-dish. It stands alone. Like fish pie, it should be served from a huge, ovenproof dish (make much more than you need, you will be back for seconds and thirds), and ladled out in great, steaming clods with, of course, the crunchy topping facing upwards. Failure to serve macaroni cheese upright does not so much suggest you are a clumsy cook as prove you have no soul. Like an inverted cross, upside-down macaroni cheese is the sign of the devil.
Serve it in large, deep bowls, the kind you might serve stew in. It must be a bowl, not just to ensure that the sauce laps around the pasta, but also because that circular bowl is like a visual representation of the deep, all-enveloping hug that this dish is about to give you. A plate, flat and stand-offish, sends entirely the wrong message.
If eating a large portion (a given, surely?), a little green salad on the side is no bad thing. You do not want to mix the two or eat them in the same mouthful, but you can dip into the salad periodically for a livener. It is there as a palate-cleanser.
Some things you should never do with macaroni cheese
Do not put it in a toastie or grilled cheese sandwich. It sounds great in principle, but in reality, it is an ungodly carb overload, a greasy step too far. You will feel queasy (if not spiritually unclean) for hours. Do not put it on a burger, deep-fry it in little balls (it is not a morsel) or use it chilled, segmented and reheated in dinky little sliders.
Drink
Pale US-style ales, sticky, stridently bitter IPAs or flinty, mineral white wines. You want something that will act as a gently abrasive counterpoint, a drink that, like that green salad, will periodically reset your palate for more superlative stodge.
So, macaroni cheese. How do you eat yours?
