The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese

Macaroni and cheese may be the ultimate American comfort food, but its history stretches back to ancient Rome. It winds through the courts of Renaissance popes and cardinals, crosses the Channel to eighteenth-century England, and arrives in the United States carried by immigrants and, crucially, by the enslaved Black women whose foundational contributions have long gone underacknowledged.

Karima Moyer-Nocchi, a culinary historian who teaches at the University of Siena, follows the trail with scholarly rigor and evident pleasure. The book is accessibly written but carefully documented, with abundant endnotes supporting a narrative that moves confidently across religion, class, race, and gender.

Recipes appear throughout as illustration rather than instruction, from a Roman placenta made with wheat and fresh cheese to modern interpretations that have again shifted expectations of what the dish can be.

Moyer-Nocchi is candid about the complexities her research surfaces. Renaissance cardinals dined on elaborate pasta and cheese preparations laced with costly spices. Wealthy young Englishmen adopted macaroni as a symbol of continental sophistication. Practical homemakers and struggling families made it affordable sustenance. The dish has served elite tables and modest ones, and its history reflects both.

This is gateway food scholarship at its most inviting: wide in scope, honest about what the record does and does not show, and devoted to a subject that turns out to have far more to say than its humble reputation suggests.

Hardcover. Color photographic insert and black-and-white images throughout.