I've never met a mac and cheese I
don't like whether it comes out of a blue box or is served with gruyere and lobster mac and cheese can do no wrong,
and so I have high hopes for this 19th century mac and cheese recipe with
the fancy name Maccaroni a la Reine. So thank you to Bright Cellars for sponsoring this
video as we celebrate gastronomy's power couple macaroni and cheese this time on Tasting History. So if you look at early macaroni and
cheese recipes they tend to be very simple: pasta, cheese, and butter. The channel Townsends did an excellent
video on making one of these early 18th century recipes for mac and cheese so
I'll put a link to that in the description but since John had already done
the 18th century I decided to move a little bit later to the 19th century when macaroni and cheese started to flex its
muscles and I found this recipe from 1845 for what I assume Eliza Acton thinks
is macaroni and cheese fit for a queen because she calls it Maccaroni a la Reine. "This is a very excellent and delicate mode of dressing maccaroni. Boil
eight ounces in the usual way, and by the time it is sufficiently tender, dissolve gently ten ounces of any
rich, well-flavored white cheese in fully three quarters of a pint
of good cream; add a little salt, a rather full seasoning of cayenne, from
half to a whole salt spoon of pounded mace, and a couple of ounces of sweet fresh butter the
cheese should in the first instance be sliced very thin it should be stirred in the cream without
intermission until it is entirely dissolved and the whole is perfectly smooth. The cheese
may be poured equally over the maccaroni... thickly covered before it is
sent to table, with fine crumbs of bread fried of a pale gold colour..."
Nothing too complicated in the process and so it really comes down to what ingredients
you're using so let's start with the macaroni. Now you can make your own
at home but you might run into the same problem that Thomas Jefferson did. See he actually wrote down a recipe for making
macaroni along with a diagram of a pasta machine, and then he had one of those
machines sent from Italy to America so he could have fresh pasta made for him but he quickly realized that the pasta was inferior to that that he
had had in Italy and in France and it all came down to the flour. He noted that "The best macaroni in Italy is made with a particular sort of flower
called Semola, in Naples..." So we ended up still importing pasta
from Italy which is actually how most people got their pasta for a very long time, and so to be appropriate to the
period you're going to want a half pound or 225 grams of dried macaroni, the shape of which is really up to you because at
the time macaroni could refer to pretty much any type of pasta. Eliza Acton even says that there
is "ribbon macaroni (or lazanges)" though the tube shape was becoming the standard when talking about
macaroni. The one thing it would not have been is the elbow shaped macaroni that we know today
because that wasn't made until a bit later. Now one thing to keep in mind when you are choosing your pasta is
that it's "of a yellowish tint (by no means white as one sees them
when they are of inferior quality)" So to prepare the pasta she says to
add a little salt and a bit of butter the size of a walnut to the boiling
water before adding in the pasta. Now she and other cookbooks from the time say
to boil the macaroni at a full rolling boil for "three-quarters of an hour" and that's after it's
often soaked for an hour or more in milk or water so I'm going to guess that they very much
liked the pasta to be much softer than we often have it today and the pasta was probably
much thicker so it did take longer to boil. Not entirely sure but if you are going to
boil it for a full three quarters of an hour that'll give you plenty of
time to pop open a bottle of wine from today's sponsor Bright Cellars, and I gotta say wine does go
very well with mac and cheese. It also goes really well with Thanksgiving pie. My dad every year the day after Thanksgiving
takes a lot of the leftovers and puts them into a pie and then bakes it and it's
absolutely fantastic you get all the flavors all at once and I always have it
with a nice glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. So if you don't like Cabernet that's okay
because with Bright Cellars you take a quick 7 question quiz and they match you with wines
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A little education with your libation. The cards tell you about the different flavors
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with the Whimsical name Dancing Juice. So whether you're going to be sharing this
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a try by clicking the link in the description, and right now Bright Cellars is giving viewers
of Tasting History a limited time offer of $50 off of your first six bottle Box by
just clicking the link in the description you can get started today and not only
do you get wine but you also get to support the channel, now there
are two reasons to drink wine, and while you nurse that glass of [insert favorite
wine here] you can start your cheese sauce, and for that what you'll need is: 10 ounces
or 285 grams of white cheese thinly sliced. Now many old recipes call for parmesan but "If Parmesan be used for it , it must be
grated; but, as we have said before it will not easily blend with the
other ingredients so as to be smooth." Use whatever you want I'm using white cheddar.
1 3/4 cup or 425 milliliters of cream, four tablespoons or 55 grams of
unsalted butter a half teaspoon of salt, a quarter teaspoon of cayenne, and a quarter teaspoon of mace. You'll
also need some dried bread crumbs. So first add the cream to
a small saucepan and bring to a simmer. Then add the cheese
and stir it in until fully melted and then add the salt, the cayenne,
mace, and the butter and stir everything in. And you can add more or less
cayenne and mace to your taste. At the same time put the bread
crumbs in a dry pan and set them over low heat keeping them
moving so they don't burn. You'll notice it can take a little while to get those breadcrumbs to that
nice golden brown that you want and yet it takes almost no time
to go from golden brown to burnt. Now with the bread crumbs, pasta,
and cheese sauce all going at the same time you might not think that
this is a good time for a lecture on the history of macaroni and cheese but here it is anyway. Pasta with cheese goes
back at least to ancient Rome. Cato the Elder's placenta which I've made here on
the channel is essentially cheese between layers of a proto-pasta called tracta. By the Middle Ages a dish with many
of the same components begins to appear lazanis the 14th century
recipes usually call for pasta to be layered with cheese and then
sweet spices like cinnamon and sugar. In the English 'The Forme of
Cury' from around 1390 has a recipe that just calls for pasta butter
and cheese and they call it 'makerouns'. In the mid 14th century in the 'Decameron'
Giovanni Boccaccio wrote of the town of Bengodi, a sadly fictional place where "on a mountain, all of grated Parmesan cheese, dwell folk
that do not but make macaroni and ravioli, and boil them in capons broth..." And he says they would roll the pasta
down the Parmesan mountain where people would scramble to get their hands on
this mythical medieval mac and cheese. Now regional differences
between macaroni also begin to appear: Naples, Genoa, Rome, they all had variations in the flour quantity the shape the
pasta and in their preparation. In 1465 Maestro Martino's recipe for
macaroni Romaneski calls for it to be plated with good cheese, butter, and sweet spices. Similar flavors to the
earlier recipe from England, and the macaroni connection between
Italy and England is rather complex. It appeared in 'The Forme of Cury'
in 1390 and then the first recipe called macaroni and cheese or rather
"to dress macaroni with Parmesan cheese" appeared in Elizabeth Raffle's 1769
'The Experienced English Housekeeper' but around that same time there's a linguistic
curveball thrown because in England the term macaroni not only referred to pasta
but also to a type of fashion. Yankee Doodle went to town a riding on a pony. He stuck a feather in his
hat and called it macaroni. Every American knows that song and
by the end of the American Revolution it had become a patriotic ditty but it actually started off as a bit of an
insult to the colonists. Some claim that it was a way to
mock the colonists by saying that they were so uncouth that merely
by putting a feather in their cap they thought that they were fashionable but I'm pretty sure it was actually
a way to attack their masculinity. See in the mid-18th century it had become popular for the wealthy young men of
England to take their Grand Tour which was a lengthy trip around
the European continent with a focus on the splendors of the Italian Peninsula. While there they would develop
a taste for the finer things in life: elegant fashion, sophisticated manners, and an appreciation for top cuisine
like the Italian macaroni and similar to the Finer Things
Club from The Office these young sophisticates became members of
what was called The Macaroni Club, and when they returned to England they wore their
ostentatious outfits and their bejeweled wigs, and had there been a RuPaul's
Macaroni Race 250 years ago they might have become cultural icons
but that is not how it turned out. See the style of dress coincided with a time where
it was very popular to mock the wealthier classes, and the fashion just made it too easy. In 1770 the Oxford magazine declared "There is
indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender
lately started up among us. It is called Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry,
it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise it
wenches without passion." They were ahead of their time
and the style was short-lived and the term macaroni returned to
meaning pasta but again any pasta. Especially in Italy any shape of
pasta was still called macaroni, in fact if you look at the many paintings and later
photographs titled macaroni eaters they are almost always Neapolitans eating long strands of
pasta with their hands, more like fettuccine or spaghetti today. And that may be what Thomas
Jefferson saw when he visited Italy in 1787. Though he had surely come in contact with macaroni
being eaten with a fork when he was in Paris. When he moved to France in 1784 he brought
along his enslaved Chef James Hemings and as Jefferson did his diplomat thing Hemings
was learning the art of French cooking. He studied under several of France's
greatest chefs at the time and is often considered to be the first American Chef
trained in France, and when they returned to America Hemings brought many of the
recipes he learned with him some of which Jefferson wrote down like
the macaroni and I intend to do an entire episode on James Hemings but for the purpose of this episode
it's important to know that it was likely his macaroni recipe that helped
make macaroni popular in the United States because Thomas Jefferson
pushed the dish on EVERYONE. Shortly after he became President Jefferson
served a macaroni pie at estate dinner in 1802. Hemings had passed away by then but it was likely
his recipe or a version of it that was used, and it's unclear if it had any cheese in it and
it wasn't actually a universal hit at first. One guest of of the dinner a member of the House
of Representatives Reverend Manasseh Cutler said "February 6th Saturday. Dined at the Presidents...
Dinner not as elegant as when we dined before... [Among other dishes] a pie called
macaroni, which appeared to be a rich crust filled with the strillions of onions or shallots which I took it to be, tasted
very strong and not agreeable." Another guest was Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark, and
when Cutler asked about the onions in the dish "Mr. Lewis told me there were none
in it; it was an Italian dish, and what appeared like onions
was made of flour and butter, with a particularly strong
liquor mixed with them." So he doesn't mention cheese in
the dish but after dinner he says "We drank tea and viewed again the great cheese" and at first I thought maybe he
was talking about the macaroni dish but no rather it is a wheel of cheese
that was given to Jefferson as a gift and Jefferson kept it
in its own like dedicated room and people would travel for days
just to to have Jefferson invite them "To the mammoth room and see the mammoth cheese." And if you think politics is divisive now back then even the cheese was
partisan as the man who made it said that when it came to the
milk used to produce the cheese "...no Federal cow must contribute a drop."
And that might explain why Cutler was such a grump at the dinner because he like
the unrepresented cows was a Federalist. Now while Cutler might have not been wooed by the macaroni most of the population
was because it starts appearing in many, many of the early cookbooks from America including 'The Virginia housewife:
Or Methodical Cook' in 1824. It was written by Mary Randolph and it does have cheese and the fact that
Mary Randolph was a close cousin to Thomas Jefferson and spent time
with the family makes me wonder if her recipe is not in some way influenced by a
version that James Heming served 50 years earlier. Now macaroni at this point was still mostly being
imported from Italy so it wasn't inexpensive, and so the dish rather than calling it simply macaroni and cheese would often
be given more elaborate names like macaroni ala sauce blanche, or maccaroni a la
reine like the one that we're making today. And even as the price of pasta
started to come down it was still "generally known as a rather
luxurious dish among the wealthy." but there was a concerted effort to change
this. In 1855 Alexis Soyer one of Victorian England's most celebrated chefs wrote of
"Vermicelli and Macaroni. Pray, Eloise, why should not the workman and mechanic partake of
these wholesome and nutritious articles of food, which have now... become so plentiful and cheap? Macaroni is now selling in
London at five pence per pound and makes four pounds of food when boiled." And it took a while but eventually it
did become accessible to the masses but once everyone was eating it it kind of
lost its appeal amongst the wealthy and so the fancy French named macaroni
and cheeses fell off of the menus of nicer restaurants especially
those in the northern United States but in the Southern United States it remained rather popular especially amongst
the African-American population. This is also where we start to see that
divide between Southern soul food style of macaroni and cheese which is made with real cheese and the boxed version that's
made with processed cheese and for the evolution of that processed macaroni
and cheese we actually have to go to Switzerland because both the macaroni
and the cheese started there. It was in Lucerne in 1872 that
elbow-shaped macaroni was first produced and completely unrelated in 1911 it was two
Swiss food chemists who were looking for a way to extend the shelf life of Emmentaler cheese
that came up with the first processed cheese. Basically cheese takes a while to mature
but then once it is it goes bad really, really quickly and can become poisonous if you eat it and so they would melt
it down to kill all the bacteria and mold, and then add sodium citrate that would
keep the melted cheese from separating and then it could be re-solidified
into a block of processed cheese, but did the Swiss put their elbow macaroni
and processed cheese together? No, it took a Canadian to do that.
James Lewis Kraft was born in 1874 and grew up on his family's
dairy farm in Stevensville Ontario. In 1903 he went into the wholesale
business when he moved to Chicago and started selling cheese to grocers off
of the back of a rented horse-drawn wagon. The issue was with cheese's short shelf life
he had trouble selling in bulk and during the summer without refrigeration
he had trouble selling it at all so doing a little research he came across
the same process that the Swiss had and melted it down and then added sodium phosphate
which seemed to work better for his cheddar. He canned the cheese and sold it in bulk all
year round and in 1916 he patented the process just before America went into WWI. That's when he sold 6 million pounds of
Kraft cheese to the American government to be sent unspoiled to the front lines in France. The cheese business boomed, he expanded
and bought Velveeta in 1927 but still the marriage between macaroni and
processed cheese had yet to be realized but then the Great Depression hit. The story
goes that during the Depression Grant Leslie, a Scottish salesman working in St Louis
Missouri, was selling his pasta and to make it more enticing would put a rubber band
around it with a packet of Kraft cheese. Well Kraft saw this and loved the
idea and decided we could do that and in 1937 they introduced Kraft Dinner
a meal for four in nine minutes for an everyday price of 19 cents. One box could
feed a family of four, or a Max of one. 8 million boxes of Kraft Dinner
were sold that first year and by 1943 80 million boxes were sold because during WWII protein from meat and
dairy were hard to come by and that box of Mac and Cheese packed a lot of
protein for just one ration coupon. It was also a quick meal for
a time when women were working in factories and not at home cooking
the complicated meals of years past, and even after the war ended that quick meal
was awful enticing as one of the radio ads said "Don't hurry, puff and wheeze.
There's a main dish that's a breeze." Kraft Dinner first came in a yellow box and
in 1954 they switched over to the blue box, and as popular as Kraft macaroni and
cheese here in the United States it's actually much more popular under
its original name Kraft Dinner or now KD up in Canada where it's often
called the unofficial meal of Canada. One thing I find interesting is that today
we just take the packet of cheese and mix it with some milk and then
the pasta and you're good to go but in 1938 when it first came out
they actually had recipes to kind of spruce it up and one of the first
recipes had a pinch of cayenne pepper just like the Victorian
recipe that I'm about to eat. So once all of the components
of the mac and cheese are ready put the drained pasta into a dish or a pan, and pour the cheese sauce over it
making sure everything is well coated. Then sprinkle on the toasted
bread crumbs and serve. And here we are Macaroni a la Reine. Fancy Victorian mac and cheese. Here we go. All right straight off my
favorite part the bread crumbs. I could've put like a whole loaf of bread crumbs on here. They just add such a wonderful texture. The rest of the texture is like
macaroni and cheese. I mean very you know smooth and and creamy
with the texture of... macaroni. The flavor is really going to depend on what
cheese you use because I'm not getting a lot of- I take that back I am getting some of the mace
and that cayenne especially at the very, very end. It takes a second at first it's
like all I'm tasting is the cheese, and it's wonderful but like I said whatever
cheese you use that's the main flavor but then you get that that mace and
that cayenne. What's interesting- oh! What's interesting is it actually reminds me of
the rice soup in the third class Titanic video. I'm thinking back on that the main ingredients, the flavors there were mace and
cayenne and it's kind of from around the same period... it's about 50 years later
I guess, but that's really interesting. Basically instead of cheese and macaroni
it's rice and milk with those spices. So you should give this one a shot
or any of the other old macaroni and cheese dishes and definitely put breadcrumbs. I'm going to start doing that just
on like Kraft macaroni and cheese because that's that's really really fantastic. So make a bowl of mac and cheese and I will
see you next time on Tasting History.
