Macaroni and Cheese

The early history of pasta is still controversial, although it is agreed that it was widespread in medieval Italy well before Marco Polo. A 1986 survey by Corby Kummer suggested the earliest pasta was in ancient China, and that it was known in the Middle East early in the Common Era. Clifford A. Wright, focusing on the diffusion of durum wheat, puts the origin in the Arab world. Certainly pasta dressed with cheese is described in most surviving medieval cooking manuscripts, including the British Forme of Cury, which gives a recipe for “macrows.” There are two versions of baked vermicelli puddings (but neither with cheese) in Hannah Glasse’s mid-eighteenth-century cookbook, the most popular British cookbook in colonial Virginia. Anglo-American macaroni of the colonial period was imported from Italy, and most probably overboiled and overbaked, as the practice is denounced in Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle in the late 1820s.