Take a thin sheet of dough and cut it into pieces, place in boiling water and cook well. Take grated cheese, melted butter, and put it beneath and above like lasagna; serve.
Martino da Como, a.k.a. Maestro Martino, a renowned chef to the aristocracy and high clergy, published a cookbook in 1465 with a butter and cheese based pasta recipe called “Roman macaroni.” Owing to its popularity, it became de rigueur that a chef of any standing create his own version of it. Macaroni, in this case, was cut noodles. Indeed, macaroni was a generic word for pasta, not a specific shape. In Boccacio’s Decameron they were most likely gnocchi, for example. Regardless, the standard preparation for any dish called macaroni involved butter and copious quantities of cheese, usually Parmesan, with the addition of sugar and cinnamon, which was used as ubiquitously then as salt and pepper is used now.
Macaroni à la mode
By the mid-18th century, macaroni and cheese had taken root in France, but the French veered away from Italian dictates toward a creamier style, a signature touch positioning the dish in the context of their own cuisine.
Around the same time, macaroni and cheese recipes were transplanted to Great Britain’s American colonies. Early evidence of pasta circulating as a highbrow standard in Virginia is first seen in Patrick Lamb’s posthumously compiled and published Royal Cookery; or the Complete Court-Cook (1710), containing a recipe called “To Make Soupe Vermicelly,” pasta in a butter-rich veal and chicken gravy. Over the space of 50 years, Lamb had made his way up through the ranks in the kitchens of the Stuart monarchy and overseen William and Mary’s coronation. He also held the official monopoly over tobacco sales to the royal households—all imported from Virginia by strict decree.
A recipe calling for “vermachelly” from Edward Kidder’s 1720 cookbook was copied into an anonymous Virginian family manuscript. In 1747, best-selling British cookbook author Hannah Glasse presented two English-style vermicelli pudding recipes as well as instructions on how to make vermicelli from scratch. Both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington had a copy of Glasse’s cookbook in their home libraries and it was on Jefferson’s wish list—just to say, pasta was not unknown among the Yankee Doodles.
However, it was in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), another cookbook that circulated in the colonies, where we get our first proper recipe for macaroni and cheese in English. Her recipe calls for thickening the sauce with butter rolled in flour, denoting once again a predilection for creaminess.
James Hemings and the limits of speculation
By the time James Hemings began his training in Paris in 1785, macaroni had already been appropriated by the French, with the additions of a white sauce or cream and Gruyère cheese, and eventually ditching the usual cinnamon and sugar. England followed suit because, after all, the best chefs in England at that time were French. The colonies tagged along, not yet having established a culinary tradition and wanting to keep up with European trends.
