When Chef Ben Hillan sketched out a special Fourth of July menu at Salt Wood Kitchen and Oysterette in Marina, there was one dish he considered its centerpiece: macaroni and cheese.
No other dish can claim such an American heritage. The pasta was mentioned in a ditty sung by Redcoats to mock colonial militia – macaroni being 18th-century slang for a hopeless dandy. Thomas Jefferson had his enslaved chef, James Hemings, prepare mac and cheese for dinner guests.
“It speaks to almost everyone,” says Alex Pailles, chef de cuisine at The Bench in Pebble Beach, where the dish is a popular item at lunch and dinner.
Pailles prepares a bechamel from fontina and brings parmesan into the mix, then bakes the mac and cheese in a wood-fired oven. It’s familiar in presentation, but with elevated ingredients and technique.
“It’s cream on cheese on cream – nice and velvety,” he says.
At Monterey’s Tarpy’s Roadhouse, Chef Tim Uttaro will occasionally serve a special version, decked with truffles or lobster (maybe both). But on the regular menu, he also prefers a more comforting mac and cheese.
That such chefs take a more recognizable approach to mac and cheese says much about its place in American culture. When the dish came to the New World, it was considered something for occasions, served for the most part at tables of the well-to-do. Recipes for pasta “pudding” appear in English food writer Hannah Glasse’s wildly popular 1747 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
Such was demand for the volume that it outsold all other cookbooks published in that entire century, according to the Northumberland Archives. Historians note that both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin owned copies. Jefferson – often mistakenly credited for introducing mac and cheese to America – went searching for the book, apparently in vain.
Yet today we recognize instead the filling product of the industrial revolution, prized for its convenience and affordability. Pailles, for example, admits that as a child he was fond of macaroni smothered in Velveeta.
“People say, ‘What can you cook for a chef?’” Hillan adds with a laugh. “I tell them, ‘You can make Kraft macaroni and cheese and I’ll be happy.’ I don’t think anyone can make it like mom used to make it.”
This journey from aristocratic to commonplace made the European concept into a truly American icon. Well into the 1800s, the dish retained its luxury status – particularly in wealthy Southern homes, where recipes were passed down through generations of Blacks cooking for white families.
In her 1877 cookbook Fifteen Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families, Juliet Corson complained about the mac and cheese gap, arguing that “It should become one of the chief foods of the people,” adding “It is one of the most wholesome and economical of foods.”
Fortunately for Corson, industrialization first brought about cheese produced on a mass scale, followed by processed foods. A cheese salesman, James L. Kraft, hit on the appetizing combination of cheddar scraps, sodium phosphate and heat, receiving a patent for this easily meltable cheese product in 1916. Velveeta hit the shelves two years later. Meanwhile Kraft set to work on a sauce powder, introducing boxed dinners in 1937.
The timing was important. The U.S. Army was Kraft’s first big customer in 1917. Kraft Dinners reached the market during the Great Depression. When war came again, those boxes dinged consumers just one ration point. And for the Baby Boom generation that followed, the quick meal became a staple.
All the while, Black families in the South were saving the traditional from-scratch recipes, baked in ovens, from the industrial juggernaut.
“They do mac and cheese right in the South,” Uttaro says. Still, he praises the versatility. For catering or events, Coastal Roots Hospitality – Tarpy’s parent company – offers build-your-own mac and cheese bars or forms prepared pasta into fritters.
“I have some guests who put mac and cheese on pepperoni pizza,” Pailles says, chuckling. “I can’t mock it because it sounds delicious.”
So what could be more American on the nation’s 250th anniversary?
“Everyone grew up with it,” Uttaro says. “Every one of us, when we see it on a menu, we at least pause and think about it.”