[Sca-cooks] mac & cheese

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Isabella di Giovanni:

>Anyway, I am working on a mac and cheese (with crimini (sp?)
>mushrooms and green chili) for our 12th Night. I have always used
>Velveeta (yeah, I know!) but it melts creamy and tastes ok. What
>kind of cheese can I use that melts with similar consistency? Hey,
>like I said, I really am new at some of this stuff.

Velveeta is made of cheese, added fats, and various stabilizers to
facilitate melting and to make it smooth. The classical
(post-medieval) culinary response to this issue, before the invention
of things like Velveeta and Cheez Whiz, was to make a white sauce,
then melt your cheese into that. The method works for nearly any kind
of cheese (at least, ones that'll melt at all). The starch that
thickens the white sauce also stabilizes the fats and proteins in the
cheese, helping to keep it from breaking into curds and leaking
butterfat.

>I guess I am looking for something that won't cover up the crimini,

Real Gruyere might be nice with criminis, possibly Emmenthaler.

>  but would also like to know about a stronger flavored one for just plain m&c.

Hard to beat Cheddar for that.

>Also, I heard on a tv show the other night that mac and cheese went
>back to b.c.  I doubt that, but does anyone have a clue if it is
>period.

There are numerous medieval recipes for pasta shaped like noodles,
boiled in broth or water and tossed with melted butter and grated
cheese. There are even some Italian ones involving the pasta dough to
be rolled out into rod shapes and then poking a hole through their
length, to produce something like a common extruded macaroni shape.
The other treatment is pretty much the same, boiling in broth,
layering or mixing in melted butter and grated cheese, topping with
powdered spices.

Macaroni and cheese of the kind Americans would recognize as such
today, seems to be 19th century (but then again, so is the kind of
Cheddar most of us would recognize, too).

The closest modern equivalent to period Macrows is probably real
fettucine Alfredo.

Adamantius