Reviving the past
Yesterday I cooked my grandmother’s macaroni cheese recipe. I cooked it again today, but with a slight difference.
The first time I stuck firmly to her recipe. It was tasty and filling and exactly what I needed on a cold and tired day.
The second time I changed the proportions. Normally this means adapting a recipe to modern taste, but I was curious to see what would happen if I adapted it to the taste of Jane Austen’s circles instead.
The flavour was better yesterday, which makes sense. This was the precise macaroni cheese of my childhood, after all, and my tastebuds probably remember it better than any other macaroni cheese in the known universe.
The adapted recipe was far more filling. I still feel stuffed, three hours after dinner. It’s amazing the difference a little more mustard and butter makes to the space food takes up in my stomach.
And that’s it. My great culinary history experiment for the week. The only other culinary history activity I’ve done all week is introduce an historical fiction writer to a few spices that were well-known in the Middle Ages. I bought some zedoary for myself at the same time.
PS Please excuse the picture - it’s midwinter and I needed something cheery.
food history, macaroni cheese, macaroni and cheese, zedoary, food of Jane Austen
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