Mac and cheese began as a posh English dish, not American diner food
Long before the blue box, macaroni baked with cheese was refined fare in English cookbooks, traceable to medieval pasta and cheese casseroles. It crossed to North America with British settlers and Thomas Jefferson's table, then became cheap comfort food when Kraft started selling a boxed version during the Great Depression.
Elizabeth Raffald printed a recipe in The Experienced English Housekeeper in 1769: macaroni in a bechamel-style cream sauce, topped with Parmesan and baked until golden and bubbling. Eliza Acton's 1845 version melted rich white cheese into cream seasoned with cayenne and mace, and the 1861 edition of Mrs Beeton's household guide served macaroni with the cheese course. An early Canadian recipe from the same era even lined the dish with puff pastry, a sign of upper-class pretensions.
In the United States, one theory credits James Hemings, who encountered the dish in France at the urging of Thomas Jefferson, a keen admirer of extruded pasta. In 1802 Jefferson served a macaroni pie at a state dinner, and one guest, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, recorded the menu without much enthusiasm. Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife of 1824, which the culinary historian Karen Hess called the century's most influential cookbook, offered a three-ingredient recipe of layered macaroni, cheese and butter. By the mid-1880s such casseroles appeared in cookbooks as far west as Kansas. Factory-made pasta and cheese brought the price down, and as more people could afford it the dish shed its elite image.
Packaging did the rest. A St Louis salesman named Grant Leslie began strapping Kraft's processed cheese to boxes of pasta with rubber bands to boost sales. Kraft hired him and launched its boxed product in 1937, advertising a meal for four in nine minutes, and it was an instant hit amid Depression hardship. Wartime rationing made it even more appealing, since a single ration stamp bought two boxes.
Canada took it closest to heart. Kraft Dinner is the country's favourite brand, one writer for The Walrus ranked it above poutine as the national dish, and Canadians buy close to a quarter of the 7 million boxes sold worldwide each week. Elsewhere the dish keeps evolving: Scots bake it into macaroni pies, Swiss herders eat Alplermagronen with cream, onions and often potatoes alongside apple sauce, and fairground stalls deep-fry it.
Source: Macaroni and cheese
