Holiday High Jinks

Another year, another holiday special. Except that this one was a little extra-special. We weren't able to celebrate AEB's 5th anniversary in November when that momentous date passed on by, so our 5th annual holiday jam* doubled as our AEB 5th Anniversary Party.

Last year, our party's centerpiece was a ham twin-set--one Kentucky country ham served raw in thin slices, and one Virginia country ham that had been baked. This year we featured another country ham--this time from William Mulder's Fresh Meats of Fredericton, NB--but, frankly, the savory fare got overshadowed a bit by our first annual AEB gingerbread house.

I can honestly say that I had nothing to do with the gingerbread house, aside from a little consulting. The gingerbread house was the product of the Montreal Cake Club (M.C.C.), a local cell of cake-decorating extremists with reputed links to Laloux, the Preservation Society, and La Salle à manger. It didn't weigh 390 pounds, and it wasn't covered in white chocolate, but, like the 2009 White House Gingerbread House, it was modeled on an actual existing structure: the M.H. Merchant Stone House.

fig. a: M.H. Merchant Stone House

The finished product looked something like this,

fig. b: M.H. Merchant Gingerbread House 1

fig. c: M.H. Merchant Gingerbread House 2

and by the morning after, it was a little worse for wear (note the candied-almond "stones" missing from the walkway),

fig. d: M.H. Merchant Gingerbread House 3

but it was still pretty magical. In fact, if you took a close look and peered through the caramel "glass" windows, you'd swear there was someone inside taking advantage of the spacious two-story, 4 1/2-room interior.

fig. e: M.H. Merchant Gingerbread House 4

Anyway, the M.C.C.'s M.H. Merchant Gingerbread House was certainly an impressive sight, and it was 100% edible, but it wasn't really meant to be eaten (that didn't stop some of our guests from trying, though). Attending to the more immediate spiritual needs of our invited guests was the following vaguely Mad Men-inspired menu:

Coca-Cola- & Chipotle-Glazed Ham
Serious Mac & Cheese, Smothered w/ Cajun Gravy
Chicken & Sausage Gumbo
Cajun Deviled Eggs
Crudités
Crackers
Cucumber-Herb Dip
Baked Artichoke Dip
Clam Dip
Cheddar Cheese
Armadale Farm Cumin Gouda

Heineken
Punchbowl Old-Fashioneds
Martinican Rum Punch

Bourbon Chocolate Cookies
Vanilla Crescents
fresh clementines

We were dead-set on another baked ham. Ham has become something of a tradition at our holiday parties, and we'd managed to source a particularly good smoked ham in the Maritimes. Then we received our December issue of Saveur--"HAM FOR THE HOLIDAYS"--and it was as if the food gods (or at least the food press gods) were speaking directly to us (and about 600,000 others). Their cover story has plenty of great-looking ham-centric recipes, but the one that really caught our attention was the Pineapple-Chipotle-Glazed Ham (who knows, might have had something to do with the fact that that's the one featured on the cover). We'd always wanted to do a Coca-Cola ham, but this recipe's Coke, chipotle, and honey glaze sounded particularly tempting.

Coca-Cola- & Chipotle-Glazed Ham

1 15-lb whole smoked ham
8 fresh pineapple slices
whole cloves
2 3/4 cups Coca-Cola
1 rounded tbsp chipotle purée
1/3 cup honey

Put the ham into a large stockpot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 60 minutes.

Heat oven to 350º. Transfer the ham to a roasting rack in a roasting pan. Using toothpicks, secure the pineapple slices to the surface of the ham. Stud the ham with cloves to taste [Saveur recommends 64 cloves, but we like our ham a little less clove-y, so we went with about half that many]. Pour 2 cups of the Coca-Cola over the ham, then add 1 cup of water to the bottom of the roasting pan. Cover loosely with foil and bake for 60 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine the remaining Coca-Cola, the chipotle purée, and the honey in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium, and cook, stirring frequently, until the glaze has reduced and become syrupy, roughly 12-15 minutes. Uncover the ham and brush it with some of the glaze. Increase the heat of the oven to 500º. Bake the ham, brushing occasionally with the glaze, until it has become browned and glossy, about 15-20 minutes. [Make sure to watch the ham carefully, though. If it starts to brown too quickly, you may want to protect it with that loose foil covering again.] Let cool for 20 minutes before carving.

As for the mac & cheese. This recipe was quite literally the product of hearsay. As in, a couple of weeks ago, I was motoring along on the Trans-Canada, listening to a podcast of American Public Media's The Splendid Table, when I heard Jane & Michael Stern gushing about Rocky & Carlo's in Chalmette, Louisiana. The segment was about the famed hybridity of Louisiana's cuisines, and the ways in which the Italian-American idiom has coupled with Cajun, Creole, and Southern cuisine in all kinds of interesting ways there, but mostly it was about Rocky & Carlo's as a prime example of this culinary bricolage. There was a lot about the Sterns' spiel that had me ready to veer off my easterly course and make a beeline for Chalmette, but the thing that stuck with me the most was their positively ecstatic descriptions of Rocky & Carlo's macaroni & cheese. They came out and anointed Rocky & Carlo's mac & cheese their very favorite mac & cheese in all of America (!). They had plenty of good reasons for naming Rocky & Carlo's mac & cheese #1, but a big part of its considerable charm had to do with the fact that you could get it smothered with either a red sauce or a Cajun brown sauce. For a split second there, I seriously thought about putting the pedal to the metal over the border and across 8 eight states all the way to Chalmette to give that smothered mac & cheese a try, but then I came up with a Plan B: put the pedal to the metal all the way to my kitchen so that I could improvise a batch of Mac & Cheese Smothered w/ Cajun Brown Sauce myself.

The following is what I came up with. Does it bear any resemblance to Rocky & Carlo's? I have no idea, but mac & cheese has rarely tasted so good.

Smothered Mac & Cheese

Make your preferred macaroni & cheese recipe, keeping in mind that you're going to smother it with a zesty roux-based brown sauce momentarily, so you might want to keep things simple and straightforward, and you might want to avoid a béchamel sauce and go with a cheese and milk/cream sauce instead (the logic: béchamel + roux + macaroni = flour + flour + flour).

Got your macaroni & cheese in the oven? Perfect. Now it's time to make your brown sauce:

1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 small onion, diced
1/2 celery stalk, diced
1/4 bell pepper (green or red), diced
2 tbsp mixed herbs (parsley, thyme, chives, etc.), finely minced
1 tbsp Cajun Magic (recipe follows)
2 cups vegetable or chicken stock (or 2 cups water, in a pinch) [we've been using vegetable stock and/or water, usually, meaning our smothered mac & cheese has been 100% vegetarian!]
salt & pepper to taste

Warm your stock in a separate saucepan.

Heat the oil over medium heat in a large non-stick frying pan or a properly seasoned skillet. When the oil is hot, add the flour all at once and begin stirring constantly. Make a deep Cajun roux. When your roux has reached your desired depth (I recommend going with a cappuccino-colored roux here), add the onion and sauté for 2-3 minutes. Add the celery and bell pepper and sauté for another 2-3 minutes. Add the herbs, stir, and add the Cajun Magic, sautéing for another minute. Add the stock in a slow stream, stirring constantly. Cook the gravy until it thickens, reaching your desired consistency. If it thickens too quickly and you want the flavors to meld a bit longer, add a bit more water or stock and cook it down some more over medium heat. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve your hot macaroni and cheese, smothering each helping with plenty of the brown sauce, and topping with a dash or two of Tabasco sauce, if you so desire.

Cajun Magic

1/4 Cup of salt
2 tbsp sweet paprika
2 tbsp cayenne pepper, espelette pepper, or hot paprika
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp black peppercorns
1 tbsp white peppercorns
2 tsp dried basil
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp dried thyme

Combine all the ingredients, and, using a mortar & pestle or an electric spice grinder, grind them together. The resultant spice blend should be lively and complex.

We knew we were making Martinican Rum Punch again this year--we've been rockin' that recipe for several years now, and it's a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. But this year we wanted to add a new drink to our arsenal of beverages. We thought about making Old-fashioneds to order, but then discovered this ingenious punchbowl version in the Esquire Party Book. Much, much easier to prepare, and our guests loved 'em. Maybe a little too much. They cleaned us out of the first batch in no seconds flat, and, the next thing we knew, a chant of "Make more punch! Make more punch!!" erupted throughout the apartment. You've been warned.

Punchbowl Old-fashioneds

8 lumps of sugar
2 tbsp bitters
1/3 cracked ice or 1 appropriately sized ice ring
1 quart bourbon or rye
16 slices of orange, lemon
16 cherries

Muddle the sugar, bitters, and ice together in a punch bowl. Add the bourbon or rye and stir well. Drink responsibly-ish.

How good were these Punchbowl Old-fashioneds? This good:

fig. f: Michelle loves Old-fashioneds

Thanks to all our guests for making our 5th anniversary bonanza such a blast and for participating so generously in our donations drive for Dans la rue.

fig. g: in the light of the miracle

Thanks to MS and CWI for packing pixels and helping us to document the festivities.

aj

* If you're particularly devoted to reading AEB and particularly good at math, you might be thinking: "seeing as you threw your first AEB holiday party just weeks after you started the blog, shouldn't this be your 6th holiday party?" And you'd be right. It should have been our 6th, but, if you must know, we skipped a year once.

Special Edition Mac & Cheese Pancakes, rev. ed.

Remember when we made Kenny Shopsin's lemon-ricotta pancakes a few months back? At the time I noted that we had found the recipe in the New York Times Magazine alongside Shopsin's infinitely more delirious Mac & Cheese Pancakes, but when it came time to choose, "it really wasn't much of a decision" because we had farm-fresh ricotta on-hand. What I didn't mention was that at the time, we couldn't for the life of us imagine what the taste and textural qualities of Mac & Cheese Pancakes might be like. We certainly were intrigued, though. So intrigued, in fact, that when we got back home, we made picking up a copy of Shopsin's Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin a top priority. Not because we needed the Mac & Cheese Pancakes recipe--it was right there in black & white in the New York Times Magazine--but because we wanted to further acquaint ourselves with the philosophy behind the Mac & Cheese Pancakes and the rest of Kenny Shopsin's ridiculously huge and hilariously inventive repertoire. And if we happened to learn the origin of the Mac & Cheese Pancake, all the better.*

fig. a: before

fig. b: after (accidents will happen)

Not only is Eat Me one of the best-looking cookbooks we've seen in quite some time (maybe ever), but it's been one of our absolute favorite reads of the last few months, and, perhaps not surprisingly, Shopsin's Mac & Cheese Pancakes were among the very first recipes that we tried out. All I can say is that--I admit it--I was a little skeptical about the Mac & Cheese Pancakes, but now, when I think of pancakes, I think of these first. I'm not even kidding. And I don't care if it's Lent and to even dream about these pancakes amounts to impure thoughts. Just mention the word "pancake" and these are all I see.

The funny thing is, the first time we made them, we read the recipe in Eat Me carefully, but somehow, unconsciously, we ended up making them not as the recipe actually instructed, but as we imagined they'd be made. [Later, I was reminded of a story: In describing Kenny's Egyptian Burrito, Calvin Trillin once wrote: "An Egyptian Burrito is a burrito, and inside is sort of what Kenny thinks Egyptians might eat."] You see, Kenny's original recipe calls for cooked elbow macaroni tossed with olive oil, with the cheddar cheese added separately. We, on the other hand, began with a pretty deluxe batch of leftover mac & cheese. Anyway, this was totally accidental, but our Mac & Cheese Pancakes ended up being at least twice as cheesy as Shopsin's, and quite a bit more savory. Problem? I don't think so. Having now read Eat Me, we know all too well what Kenny thinks of bacon in pancakes. We have a feeling he'd give his blessing to our Special Edition Mac & Cheese Pancakes.

What you need:

fig. c: leftover mac & cheese

1. leftover macaroni & cheese, preferably leftovers from a batch of E & D Special Mac & Cheese.

fig. d: pancake batter

2. pancake batter, such as this one:

Pancake Batter

7 tablespoons butter
1 1/3 cups whole milk
3 large eggs
1 1/4 cups flour
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon plus 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt.

In a saucepan over medium-low heat, heat the butter and milk until the butter melts. Set aside until lukewarm. Beat the eggs in a medium bowl. Slowly pour 1/2 cup of the warm milk mixture into the eggs while stirring. Stir in the remaining milk mixture.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Pour the egg mixture into the flour mixture, a little at a time, stirring slowly, just until the dry ingredients are moistened. The batter should be lumpy and will start to bubble.

Makes about 3 1/2 cups.

fig. e: cheddar cheese

3. a block of medium-sharp cheddar cheese

What you need to know:

Special Edition Mac & Cheese Pancakes**

butter for the skillet and for serving
3 cups pancake batter
1 heaping cup macaroni & cheese, preferably E & D Special Mac & Cheese, at room temperature
1 heaping cup grated cheddar cheese
medium Grade A (or B--Kenny prefers B) maple syrup

Heat your skillet over medium heat. When it's hot, add the butter and run it across the skillet surface, then use a small ladle to pour the batter on the skillet. When small bubbles cover 40-50% of the surface of your pancakes (after about 2 minutes), drop about 1 tablespoon of the mac & cheese on each pancake, and then, as if that wasn't enough, sprinkle a layer of cheddar on top, before using a thin spatula to quickly and artfully flip the pancakes. Turn the heat down a little, use the spatula to press down on the pancakes a bit, and when the undersides are golden, about 2 minutes later, use the spatula to transfer the pancakes to a plate, mac & cheese & cheese side up.

Serve with butter and maple syrup. Makes roughly 12 4-inch pancakes.

[inspired by Kenny Shopsin's Mac n Cheese Pancakes, Eat Me]

If all goes well they should look something like this:

fig. f: the finished product

And they should taste outrageously good. You see, our E & D Special Mac & Cheese has a copious amount of thick-cut bacon in it, so what you end up with is a Mac & Cheese Pancake with bacon built right into it. Then, with a knob of butter and a little maple syrup... As Kenny might say: "It's really very sexy."

aj

* We did: it was a dish specially invented for a regular customer who only ever ordered one of two dishes at Shopsin's, the mac & cheese or the pancakes, and who one day asked Kenny to decide which he should have.

** Now with extra cheese!

Kentucky Fried Birthday, or Food is the New Golf Punk and Other Stories

AEB Sweet Tea

We seem to have forgotten Michelle's birthday altogether last year. Can't exactly recall what the mix-up was, but her birthday clearly wasn't significant enough to warrant mention in the pages of this very blog.

We got back on track in 2007, though. Months ago Michelle told me that the "only thing" she wanted for her birthday was a batch of MO-style ribs. I was all too happy to comply, and as the blessed event came into view we decided to turn the occasion into a little party, a little party with a Southern theme to it, a Kentucky Fried birthday.

This is the menu we devised:

1 punchbowl of AEB sweet tea (pictured above), hooch optional
1 large bowl poor man's caviar
1 large bowl tidewater cole slaw
1 casserole macaroni & cheese
24 pieces of AEB fried chicken
4 racks of MO-style ribs

We sent out invitations, and, sure enough, a dozen eager guests turned up on the appointed night.

Under the influence of our fortified sweet tea our conversation roamed far and wide, from the impending provincial election here in Quebec, to whether food is the new golf punk. I kid you not. I can't even remember how, but at some point the phrase/cultural phenomenon "golf punk" came up. Most at the table weren't familiar with the phrase, so I went ahead and tried to describe that moment sometime in the mid to late '90s when golf punk was some kind of "thing." Maybe it was just an ugly nightmare, but I think there was even a golf punk magazine at some point there. Anyway, as it turns out, our friend A. had recently met with the editorial board of an L.A.-based culture rag to talk about a food piece he was working on. Apparently during the meeting some guy from the magazine turned to A. and, in a rhetorical flourish worthy of Sex and the City, asked, "What is it with food these days? Is food the new golf punk?" We all laughed, decided, "No, thank god!," and dug deeper into our Southern spread.

When we'd eaten and eaten well we moved on to the after-dinner entertainment, a rousing round of our very favorite game, a game that we'd tentatively titled One Linerz some months ago, but which we since have had the good sense to rename The Favourite Game because, frankly, it is, but also as a kind of loving tribute to "Laughing Lenny" Cohen, whose oeuvre came into play on that particular night. "How do you play?," you ask. Good question. Since we're not providing you with any other recipes this time around, might as well provide you with the recipe to a game that has a lot of similarities to Balderdash, but which we find endlessly more entertaining.

The Favourite Game

First, you need a goodly amount of witty people. You also need a fully stocked set of bookshelves. By drawing straws, playing rock-paper-scissors, arm wrestling, or some other means, you pick someone to go first. This person goes to the bookshelves and selects a title. He or she returns to the group and presents the selected title. The book is displayed to the crowd and they're told whether it's a fiction or non-fiction title. Then the presenter reads some material off the back of the book or from the dust jacket: a brief description, a blurb, some biographical information about the author. Not much, just enough to give the contestants a feel for the book, its author, its style.

When the mood has been set, the contestants are asked to take a pen and a piece of paper and secretly compose what they believe could be the book's very first sentence (from Chapter 1, that is). While the contestants are busy scribbling away, the presenter writes out the actual first sentence from said book. When each of the contestants has composed their contribution (5-10 minutes is quick enough to keep the game moving at a fair clip) the presenter collects the compositions, reads through them to his or her self to become familiarized with them, shuffles them, and then reads each of the first sentences in a credible and impartial tone of voice, including the actual one. When the presenter has read all of the possibilities, he or she will probably have to read through them one more time so that the contestants can really wrap their heads around them, especially if the contributions are good.

Each contestant must then try to guess which one of the possible first lines is the real one from the actual book. Each contestant who successfully identifies the first line of the chosen book gets one point. But contestants whose sentences are mistakenly chosen by other members of the group get a point for each time their sentence was chosen. The presenter is ineligible from scoring and takes pleasure solely from having chosen the book in question, from presenting it to the crowd, from collecting the contributions, and from reading each contribution out loud to the contestants.* In other words, it's good if you can identify the voice of an author to the point that you can successfully determine which sentence is actually taken from the book in question, but it's much, much better to be able to pen a sentence that fools one or more of your fellow contestants into selecting it. The real skill here is in forgery (and actually, now that I think of it, F is for Fake would be yet another appropriate name for this game).

Note: strictly speaking, this isn't a "drinking game," but we've found that alcohol, although technically a depressant, can stimulate the creative juices necessary to serially compose the kinds of apocryphal texts needed for a lively soirée.

Books selected on this particular occasion included Death in Venice, Beautiful Losers, Libra, The Anaïs Nin Reader, Labyrinths, Classic Crews, and Philosophy in the Bedroom. Imagine the possibilities.

An earlier session, some months ago, ran the gamut from American Country Cheese to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.

By the time we finished playing it was already 1:00 a.m. (on a school night!). We moved back into the kitchen, awarded each of our guests a chicken-'n'-rib prize pack, bid them some fond adieus, and called it a night.

aj

R.I.D. to A. and L. for introducing us to The Favourite Game.

* As long as you play The Favourite Game in full rounds everyone at the table will be on equal ground in this regard.

E & D Special, rev. ed.

I once had a radio show in Vancouver that was purportedly simulcast from a rough-and-tumble bar "at the corner of Main & Main" called The Hi-Hat. The idea was that every other Saturday night the radio station sent its mobile unit to the Hi-Hat in order to capture the DJ set and the atmosphere live and then spread the joy via the miracle of radio communications. The, uh, illusion was maintained through the use of ambient sound effects (crowd chatter, glasses clinking, a band tuning up, etc.) and my running banter with the bartender, Nick, and some of the other imaginary regulars. But, hey, enough about me, 'cause we've got big news to report.

What follows is the latest breakthrough from our AEB-affiliate test kitchen in Brooklyn, down at the intersection of Ellwood & Dumont. Our mac lab there has been working furiously for some time to develop a master version of that American classic, macaroni & cheese. In order to do so, they had to face up to the fact that like virtually every other aspect of American cuisine and American culture more generally, good old-fashioned mac & cheese, that staple of home kitchens and diners from sea to shining sea, really isn't all that American. It's become so, yes, but its history dates back hundreds of years before Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Schoolhouse Rock, or any of the rest of that jazz.

First off, as many have pointed out before and many of you out there already know, that myth about Marco Polo discovering pasta in China then bringing it back to Venice and introducing it to the Italian palate is just that: a myth. He might very well have brought some noodles back from Cathay with him (who could blame him?), but pasta had been known on the Italian peninsula in a variety of forms for quite a while (some say well over 1,000 years) by the time the Polos returned and published their famous account of their travels, and macaroni was one of the most basic types. So basic that it became known as a generic term in Italian (and later in English) for virtually all pasta that was not flat, like lasagne, or stuffed, like ravioli. So basic that its name doesn't appear to have been derived from a word having to do with its now characteristic shape, as one might have expected, but instead seems to have come from the old Italian word maccare, "to pound" (durum wheat, presumably), the same word that forms the root of macaroon and macaron (a dessert made of pounded almonds) and the modern Italian word macarie, or "rubble."

In any case, by the 14th and 15th centuries, not only was macaroni well known throughout Italy, it had already made its way to England, and recipes for macaroni and cheese were already in circulation in both places. Thus, The Forme of Cury, ca. 1390, a collection of recipes compiled by the "Master-Cooks of King Richard II." despite its evident difficulties with Italian names, contains the following Ur-mac & cheese:

Macrows: take and make a thynne foyle of dowh, and kerve it on peces, and cast hem on boillyng water & seeth it well. Take chese and grate it and butter cast bynethen and above as losyns and serue forth.

or

Macrows: take and make a thin foil of dough, and carve it into pieces, and cast them into boiling water, and seeth it well. Take cheese and grate it and butter cast beneath and above... and serve forth.

While 30 years later, the man credited with having compiled early Modern Italy's culinary repertoire, "the first modern cookery book," Maestro Martino da Como, included this somewhat more detailed recipe for Maccaroni siciliani in his Libro de arte coquinaria, or The Book of Culinary Art:

Make a dough of the best flour, mixed with the white of one egg and rosewater, blended with water. If you want to make only two plates of it add only one or two yolks, making this a very tough dough, and roll small round sticks a handswidth in length and the thickness of straw. Take an iron rod a handswidth long and a cord thick and use to roll the sticks of dough on the table with both hands. Then pull the metal rod out and a macaroni with a hollowed center remains. Dry these macaronis in the sun. Once dry, they can be kept for two to three years. Cook in water or a good meat stock and sprinkle with grated cheese when you serve them with melted butter and mild spices.

By the late-19th century, not only was macaroni and cheese very well known in England--due in no small part to the craze for all things Italian, including pasta, that swept through the English aristocracy the century before--it had actually been so firmly established as part of the English culinary repertoire that it was actually beginning to lose its sense of Italianess. Key to this shift was the work of Eliza Acton, whose 1845 cookbook promoted the use of English cheese in the making of macaroni and cheese, not out of jingoism necessarily, but because she claimed to prefer the results over more traditional Continental methods. Mrs. Beeton's version, on the other hand, listed under the subject heading "Farinaceous preparations," was more clearly derivative of French variations, where the end result is more of a "macaroni and cheese sauce" than a "macaroni and cheese."

American macaroni and cheese appears to be largely derivative of the English tradition. There were certainly other influences, and Thomas Jefferson himself is credited with having spread the craze on American soil, having returned from his ambassadorship to France a convert, but American versions of macaroni and cheese appear to have followed the English lead, probably because the early American cheesemaking tradition was so English in its orientation. That said, I also wouldn't want to underestimate the influence of the song "Yankee Doodle" in popularizing the dish, even if the most common version of the song is derisively anti-American and the "macaroni" in question is a reference to Americans as fashion victims that has virtually nothing to do with cuisine*. At the very least, the song made the term widely known in America, across classes. Surely, that couldn't have hurt the dish's popularization. I haven't checked to see if De Tocqueville has anything to say on the subject, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's got some pithy remark somewhere in Democracy in America that touches on this phenomenon. [Actually, given the timelines and America's reputation for ingenuity, who knows, maybe it was America's use of English-style cheddars and its democratization of the dish that convinced Acton et al. to transform macaroni and cheese into something more popularly English. Maybe the standard English macaroni and cheese is in some ways derivative of the American tradition! Better yet, maybe there's some Canadian angle that trumps them both!]

Anyway, all of this is to say that what our team at the mac lab settled on was a recipe with big-city sophistication and back-country charm, one that was decidedly Anglo-American, but nonetheless managed to include French and Italian touches dating all the way back to Maestro Martino (no rosewater, but lots of spice). As is befitting a true macaroni and cheese, you'll find no tricks, no gimmicks of any kind in this recipe, just quality ingredients like artisanal cheddar,



smoked bacon,



and nutmeg,



lots of nutmeg, all prepared with care.

In the "Personal Passions" section of his Simple Cooking, John Thorne describes the making of macaroni and cheese as a signal example of something he calls "resonance." As he puts it,

One important dimension of kitchen experience is what I have previously called--for lack of a better term--resonance, a palpable depth to the things out of which we make our meals. In their way, these things speak, and it is our ability to hear, to enter into a kind of conversation with them that marks our crossing over from kitchen worker, however skilled, to true cook.

In the modern kitchen, this resonance is often only barely perceptible; someone else in the kitchen might not be aware of it at all. But the cook, even if not consciously attentive to it, is aware, because to the extent we coax it into being, we increase the reality, the meaningfulness of the cooking experience. And this resonance is strongest in those ordinary, familiar dishes with no aura of specialness to distract us from the actual experience of making.

As Thorne emphasizes--and this is true of so many of the dishes we champion here in the pages of "...an endless banquet"--

there is... nothing in the making of macaroni and cheese... to offer true challenge to the good cook. If kudos are wanted, they must be earned making something else. But mastery of the difficult is only one of the rewards of cooking, and it is worth remembering now and again that there is a humbler gift a dish can give the cook: the pleasure of its company.

Here's to good company!

E & D Special Mac and Cheese

7 tbsp butter
1 onion, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
3 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 lb thick-cut smoked bacon (we used Dakin Farm, but our mac lab recommends good-quality Polish bacon)
4 cups milk
1 cup sharp white cheddar, grated (we used a combination of Isle aux Grues 2-year and Shelburne Farm smoked)
1 cup Gruyère, grated
1/4 cup Parmesan, grated
1 lb macaroni, cooked to the point just prior to al dente
freshly ground nutmeg to taste
1/4 – 1/2 tsp mixed smoked and sweet paprika
freshly ground pepper to taste
salt to taste

Cook your pasta until just before it becomes al dente. As Thorne puts it, you want your pasta to still have, "a tiny bit of 'spine' or crunch, so it can finish its cooking absorbing the taste and savor of the sauce."

Preheat your oven to 400º F. Fry the bacon. Set it aside to cool, saving the bacon drippings, and when it has cooled, chop it into small pieces.

Melt 4 tbsp of the butter in the bacon drippings. Add the onion and sauté over medium heat for 3-4 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté until the onion is golden. Add the flour and sauté for 2-3 minutes. Whisk the milk in, a few tablespoons at a time, and continue cooking over medium heat until you’ve poured in all the milk and the mixture is beginning to take on the characteristics of a thick shake. Add the spices and adjust the seasonings. Use enough nutmeg to give the béchamel-like sauce a nice nutmeggy flavor, but not enough to make you hallucinate wildly (the mac and cheese will accomplish this on its own).

Add the cheese in portions and stir until the cheese has melted and the sauce is smooth again. Stir in the cooked pasta, then the bacon.

Butter the inside of a large lidded casserole with another tbsp of the butter. Pour the mac and cheese mixture in the buttered casserole, top with the breadcrumbs, then the Parmesan. Take the final 2 tbsp of butter, cut into several nubbins, and add these to the top of the gratin.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes with the lid on. Remove the lid and bake for another 10 minutes. Serve hot with a nice salad. We recommend a salad with apple or pear in it.

Have your own mac & cheese master recipe that you'd like to share with the AEB mac lab? Do tell. Send us an email or post a comment.

aj

sources:
The Forme of Cury
John Thorne, "Macaroni and Cheese," Simple Cooking
Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food
Mark Kurlansky, "Martino's Sicilian Macaroni," Choice Cuts: A Miscellany of Food Writing
Mrs. Beeton's Every-day Cookery
Bill Buford, Heat

*The term "macaroni" was used to describe a type of 18th English fop with a propensity for garish wigs (whose curls were said to resemble tubular pasta on a grand scale) and affected speech.

p.s. very special thanks to S.C.E.

Erratum: Apparently the AEB mac lab moved recently unbeknownst even to us. It's no longer at the intersection of Ellwood & Dumont as reported; it's on Ellwood a few blocks away from Dumont. We'll leave the names of the post and the recipe as is, though, for posterity's sake.