Mac And Cheese-!
Yesterday, I was about to drive to my daughter’s house for the delayed Christmas dinner (due to my unexpected operation a few weeks ago) for me, her mother, and the latter’s husband. She texted me that she would have the leftovers, including mac and cheese.
Mac and cheese? It was the first time she said this food to me in her 33-year life. Well, I might not told her about this food before.
After arriving there, I learned she did not make it, but she ordered the Christmas package from the Honey Baked Hams store.
Three decades ago, I worked as a kitchen aide at the Kings Creek Country Club in Rehoboth Beach, DE (while looking for a suitable job.) One night, we served the pre-Prom dinner for local high school students. The first food running out was Mac and Cheese!! It caused me to wonder why this food is so popular.
Mac and cheese made the national news briefly after the media found out that a teenage Chelsea Clinton only wanted macaroni and cheese — the kind in the blue box — for dinner.
The former White House chef, Chef John Moeller, had a tiny bit.
One night, somewhat early on in her father's administration, Chelsea Clinton was eating alone and asked for macaroni and cheese. After Moeller whipped up a bechamel sauce with fancy cheese from scratch, she thanked him kindly but said she preferred the Kraft mac from the blue box.
Suddenly, Michelle Obama banned Chelsea Clinton's Favorite Dish from the White House.
Michelle told Cooking Light magazine to explain:
My kids loved the macaroni and cheese in a box. And [Sam] said, if it’s not real food, then we’re not going to do it. If we want macaroni and cheese, we’ll cook it with real milk and real cheese. He said there’s nothing wrong with mac and cheese, but it’s got to be real food.
So my oldest daughter [Malia], who was probably 8 at the time, he took a block of cheese, and he said, if you can cut this cheese up into the powder that is the cheese of the boxed macaroni and cheese, then we’ll use it. She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust. I mean, she was really focused on it, and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box, because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of that story.
Guess who popularized the mac and cheese in America?
Watch the video “The Secret History of Mac & Cheese in 109 Seconds.”
Yeah, Thomas Jefferson introduced America to mac and cheese at a White House dinner in 1802, and the rest is history.
However, Slave James Hemings was the real inventor of Mac and Cheese –not Thomas Jefferson. (Yes, he was Sally Hemings's brother.)
Read a whole story about Thomas’ chef, “Love Mac and Cheese? You can thank the slave of a founding father for it.”
Recently, I asked my daughter if she recalled that her grandmother (my mother) cooked Mac and Cheese for her while visiting her grandparents. She replied that it was a long time but did not remember it.
Yes, my mother did not cook Mac and Cheese or any food with real cheese while I grew up. The reason was that my dad disliked cheese! I wish to know why, but both parents were gone.
Love this story! And like your dad I'm not crazy about cheese (with the exception of pizza).