Thanksgiving Day without Macaroni and Cheese, No Way!

Like Chess Pie, I could not find when and how baked macaroni and cheese entered into the list of African American/southern must have special occasion foods. In research for my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/excerpt, I found the earliest reference to macaroni and cheese in a 1928 report about farm families in the Mississippi Delta by Dorothy Dickins. Dickins found that most African-American women had never tasted macaroni and cheese and only a few cooked it for their families because they complained that it was too “starchy and gummy.” Dickins goes on to say, “The majority feels that they have too little cash to spend on something which they perhaps cannot properly prepare or which, if they can, the family probably will not like.” What is interesting about this quote is that since the 1960s, no African-American Thanksgiving day that I have attended prepared by southern born women was considered complete without at least one large pan of labor-intensive homemade baked macaroni and cheese with bread crumbs on top. Yale University Historian Peter Freedman recently shared with me that macaroni and cheese had become quite popular in nineteenth century Europe. Freedman, says 19th century European menus listed: "Macaroni with cheese," "Macaroni au Parmesan," "Macaroni a la creme," "Macaroni au gratin," "Macaroni in a form," "Macaroni a la Napolitaine," "Macaronia l'Italienne," and "Baked macaroni." Another culinary writer added that nutrition experts pushed it here in North America around the turn of the century as a healthy poor person’s food. My theory is that that Italian immigrants living in poor multiethnic communities in introduced pasta to their African Americans neighbors around the time of the Depression who then added soul to it— a natural instinct and intuitive understanding of how to make something wonderful out of the simple, or out of what wealthier folks claimed had no apparent value. Here’s recipe I believe you and your guess will enjoy this Thanksgiving Day. Here’s a tip one of my Marist College students just gave me—use Gold Fish crackers instead of bread crumbs. He says, “it's awesome” and very inviting to children who are picky eaters.

Southern-Macaroni-and-Cheese Recipe: http://www.macaronicheeserecipes.com/Southern-Macaroni-and-Cheese.htm