HURRAH FOR MAC ’N’ CHEESE (AND FOR HISTORY AND NON-BINARY GENDER) 

SO THERE I WAS, READING “THE ORIGINAL MACARONI CHEESE” by Eleanor Barnett in BBC HISTORY. She evidently knows her stuff, being as she is a food historian at Cardiff University. Of course I already knew about Yankee Doodle sticking a feather in his cap and calling it macaroni. But what else?

“Mac ’n’ cheese,” Professor Barnett writes, “is an American classic. It’s the ultimate comfort food: cheesy, gooey, warming. One persistent myth maintains that Thomas Jefferson brought James Hemings, an enslaved man, to France to train as a chef; he then brought back a pasta machine and a recipe for macaroni and cheese to service to the American elite.” 

Hmm…. James Hemings; is he related to Sally Hemings? And what about calling that feather a macaroni? Lots to research here.  

Mac ’n’ Cheese. Barnett says that Italians had been “pairing pasta with cheese since at least the Middle Ages,” though we wouldn’t recognize any of these in what we call mac ’n’ cheese today. She recounts, “The first reference to modern macaroni cheese comes from Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), and it is this recipe that I have recreated here.”

Wikipedia offers the recipe in Raffald’s own words: “To dress Macaroni with Permasent Cheese. Boil four Ounces of Macaroni ’till it be quite tender, and lay it on a Sieve to drain, then put it in a Tolling Pan, with about a Gill of good Cream, a Lump of Butter rolled in Flour, boil it five Minutes, pour it on a Plate, lay all over it Permasent Cheese toasted; send it to the Table on a Water Plate, for it soon goes cold.”

The Wayles, the Hemings, and the Jeffersons. “The Life  of James Hemings; Family, French Cuisine, and Freedom” appears at Monticello.org. It describes, “James Hemings (1765-1801) was a Paris-trained Chef de Cuisine born into slavery in colonial Virginia. Serving as head chef for Thomas Jefferson for seven years, he prepared meals for America’s political and societal elites at Monticello, New York City, and Philadelphia. Hemings likely learned to make macaroni and cheese during his training in France and helped popularize the dish in America. After negotiating with Jefferson, Hemings was granted freedom in 1796 but passed away in Baltimore just five years later.” 

In more detail, the website recounts that John Wayles was a slave trader and lawyer whose daughter Martha married Thomas Jefferson. Wayles also fathered five children with enslaved Elizabeth Hemings, among them James and younger sister Sally. Thus, Jefferson’s wife Martha and the Hemings kids were half-siblings. 

Meanwhile, in the British Isles…. The Macaronis were gender-bending dandies, as described by Michael Waters in “The Macaroni in ‘Yankee Doodle’ Is Not What You Think,” Atlas Obscura, August 24, 2016. Waters recounts, “The ‘macaroni’ in question does not, however, refer to the food, but rather to a fashion trend that began in the 1760s among aristocratic British men. On returning from a Grand Tour (a then-standard trip across Continental Europe intended to deepen cultural knowledge), these young men brought to England a stylish sense of fashion consisting of large wigs and slim clothing as well as a penchant for the then-little-known Italian dish for which they were named. In England at large, the word ‘macaroni’ took on a larger significance. To be ‘macaroni’ was to be sophisticated, upper class, and worldly.”

Then, like many a fad, this one took to extremes: “But in the 1770s,” Waters says, “as macaroni fashion spread beyond its aristocratic roots, these traces of femininity were amplified many times over. Thus came the second wave, when macaroni men were defined by their effeminacy.”

A Gender Non-Binary. Waters cites, “The Oxford Magazine similarly described the macaroni as not belonging to the gender binary: ‘There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male, nor female, a thing of neuter gender, lately started up among us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasure, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’ ”

Ouch.

Public Shaming as an Industry. “In the early 1770s,” Waters observes, “Mary Darly, a cartoonist by trade, devoted so much energy to caricaturing macaronis that her store in London became known as ‘The Macaroni Print Shop.’ Darly’s ridicule of macaronis became the first widespread use of the caricature as a means of social commentary.”

Waters continues, “In one caricature, entitled ‘What, is this my son Tom?’ [see the montage above], a farmer pokes at his son’s wig with a whip, unable to believe that his son has taken on such an effeminate dress. The son, meanwhile, is presented as ridiculous: his hair and pigtails are gigantic, his cane is inexplicably tassled, and he carries around a decorative sword.”

Macaronis as Folk Heroes. “Macaronis were certainly odd,” Waters observes, “but they were also brave. In a society that emphasized individuality, it is not hard to imagine that they became folk heroes of a kind—and that many of the people who laughed at them felt a tug of longing for the freedom with which they lived.” 

Waters concludes, “By the time the macaroni fashion trend died in the early 1780s, the legacy of these early gender-role rebels was preserved almost entirely through caricatures. Well, and through that peculiar song, where a man confuses a feather for macaroni.” ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025