Macaroni & Breakfast
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Speaking of which, I’m deeply interested in trying these two breakfasts:
Image: Envisioning the American Dream
And Called It Macaroni
It is often said that Thomas Jefferson brought macaroni and cheese to America. This is obviously absurd - for one thing, if anyone in Jefferson’s family was responsible for the dish arriving in the U.S., it was his brother-in-law James Hemings.
But another point that sticks in my craw is this: what we call macaroni and what people in the late 18th/early 19th century called macaroni are not the same. Alexandre Dumas called macaroni “long pipes of pity” (he did not care for it); a guest at Monticello wrote that he mistook the pasta for “strillions of onions.” In fact, the often-noted macaroni press that Jefferson had shipped to Virginia from Naples was actually a mold for long, thin pasta. You know, spaghetti. In Italian, “maccheroni” was a catch-all term for a number of dried pastas. Jefferson and his cohort didn’t know that they could get more specific.
Even today, in the U.S., “macaroni product” covers about a dozen types of Italian noodles. What we call macaroni - elbow pasta - probably originated in what is now Switzerland (totally different culinary culture than Naples), and was most often used in soups. A lot of people claim to know who invented macaroni and cheese as we know it, and when, but it’s too much of a mash-up of western European ingredients and techniques to pinpoint. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. But Thomas Jefferson is not part of the story.
Food-Related Laffs:
Munya!
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