Comfort food history: the story of mac and cheese

If any one dish typified the term ‘comfort food’ it would have to be macaroni and cheese. Many of us grew up on the stuff, whether from a box or, if you were lucky, made from scratch with lots of cheesy goodness. Ours was a “blue box” family, and it is one of the first foods I was able to make by myself. Even if you love mac and cheese, you might not know a lot about its history, but that’s okay because Epicurious delivers everything you want to know about your favorite comfort food.

Mac and cheese traces its roots to ancient Rome, although the few recipes that survive from that time more closely resemble lasagna than macaroni and cheese. Still, it’s the first time the combination of pasta and cheese appears in the record. Things go dark for a few hundred years, but the combo reappears in the 13th century, which also gives us the first recorded use of the word ‘macaroni’, from an inventory of the belongings of a military officer.

Many people have credited Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved cook, James Hemings, with bringing the dish to the Americas although evidence is scant and circumstantial. Regardless of whether he introduced macaroni and cheese to the colonies, over the course of the next century, the development of the dish became the provenance of Black women cooks as they were the main drivers of American cooking trends. The EYB Library contains hundreds of recipes for both stovetop and baked mac and cheese, so we a huge thank you to everyone who helped create this ubiquitous comfort food.