Why the Black American origins of mac and cheese are so hotly debated

The Guardian

22-12-2024

It stood on my kitchen bookshelf, Sylvia's Family Soul Food Cookbook: From Hemingway, South Carolina, to Harlem, with its ashen purple spine and gold lettering that twinkled in the November light. In what felt like a taunt, the book's presence made me reconsider a takeout Thanksgiving on the couch. Since 2021, I've lost both parents, which has consumed both my heart and my usual cooking mind, dampening my desire to reach for the familiar.
The cookbook, a portal to my childhood and one of my mom's favorites from her massive cookbook collection, had a traditional recipe I knew I had to try: golden brown macaroni and cheese. I'm a Black Southern woman and cook with roots in Georgia and Alabama, so making mac and cheese was not something I needed formal instruction to execute or master. But in the past few years, the way I've made my mac with a béchamel-based roux and too many fancy cheeses I can't pronounce was no longer satisfying.
I had started to crave the 'old school' way of making it – the way our aunties, older cousins and grandmas made it: with eggs, Country Crock or Imperial margarine, elbow macaroni noodles, evaporated milk and a smattering of sharp cheddar cheese with its characteristic bite and twang.
The online debate about the different ways to make the popular soul-food side – roux or no roux – has gone on for years, reappearing like clockwork every holiday season. This discourse – fueled by posts on X, Instagram reels flaunting gooey roux-based cheese pulls and TikToks of users defending their family's traditional versions – is almost always intense. That's mainly because it is informed by the flawed assumption that there is one rightful, authentic way for Black people to make mac and cheese, the culinary centerpiece of many of our gatherings. As a result, the tension goes far beyond what one might consider petty social media arguments.
'These ideas and arguments surface over time,' said Psyche Williams-Forson, PhD, the chair of the American studies program at University of Maryland-College Park, and the author of the James Beard award-winning book Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America. 'Part of what I know happens is we as Black people, and we as people, are so unaware of our history that we think everything is new and novel. If we would release that nostalgia and be more informed about our histories, perhaps we wouldn't have so many devastating challenges in our thinking.'
Only then might one note, for instance, that James Hemings, a formerly enslaved man who became America's first French-trained chef, is largely credited for bringing macaroni and cheese to the US in the late 18th century. Hemings made mac and cheese in the roux style that so many of us unknowingly returned to in modern times. In the decades after Hemings' introduction, though, Black Southerners, many of whom had previously been enslaved, used what ingredients they had on hand, creating a more simplified version with the egg custard base, which then led to its widespread adoption as 'the original'.
Williams-Forson added that recipes are not static but instead are ever-evolving, changing with climate, available resources, palate preferences and regional variances.
In a video on the innovation of Hemings, who learned to make mac and cheese in France as a companion of his enslaver Thomas Jefferson, the food historian Karima Moyer-Nocchi noted the historical development of the dish. While mac and cheese started off as an ancient Roman festival food, different renditions have always been part of its story.
The colonial-era cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy had perhaps the earliest recorded recipe of mac and cheese, but another 'very popular book' in the colonies was Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper, Moyer-Nocchi said in the video: 'She has a recipe that is actually called macaroni and parmesan, where the thickening takes place with a ball of butter that is rolled in flour, a very common way of thickening then. She's also got cream in it.'
Seeing the mac and cheese commentary online this time around showed me something I wasn't otherwise aware of: there were others like me looking back to the way we used to make it, reaching for those recipes. Those of us trying to shirk off internalized shame that taught us we needed to make changes – swapping out cheddar for smoked gouda, gruyere or fontina – in the name of elevation. And that there were many others overwhelmed with grief, like I was, that shaped how or what they cooked.
The reasons for this are clear: Black families like mine have seen unprecedented levels of loss in the last four years. A two-year assessment examining the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on Black children, for instance, reports older Black Americans aged 65-74 as five times more likely to die from Covid than white Americans of that age. Our elders, those aged 75-84, died from Covid nearly four times more than those of white Americans.
This means countless Black children lost either a parent or caregiver during those early years of the pandemic, and many had been the keepers of food rituals within our families. With those generational losses, many of us attach impassioned feelings to a dish that is so much more than just food.
Hemings, for his part, paved the way for all our families' renditions, whether roux-based or not. Black Southern cooks like our enslaved foremothers and later generations of women like Sylvia Woods, of the famed Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem, were the true progenitors of mac and cheese.
Though Woods' restaurant is still open, her death in 2012 crystallized the heaviness of what we continue to lose when it comes to our food and the indelible memories attached to it. Who will capture these culinary heirlooms? Are newer generations up to the task of passing the baton?
Some of those generations are joyously embodying the newfound culinary responsibility, without the heaviness of obligation. Jordan Ali, a spiritual worker from Denmark, South Carolina, believes the commentary online has been interesting to watch. Her two-part TikTok series, Been Country, features her 81-year-old grandmother Rosa Tyler in real time making her mac and cheese. I used Ali's TikToks along with the recipe in Sylvia's cookbook to help steel me.
'I felt like I needed to document the recipes I grew up on,' Ali said about her decision to post her grandmother cooking online. 'I learned how to cook because I stayed with my grandmother. I was adopted by her and she was my guardian for the first part of my life. It was also a way to honor her.'
Ali sees these recipes as tangible mementos of her lineage, recipes she's determined to preserve for herself and future generations. 'She's getting older and I wanted documentation for myself, for my children to see, for my siblings to look at later down the line,' Ali said. 'It's not just cooking. It's really communing with your elders. They're telling stories, they're cooking, you're talking, you're laughing. It's an experience. It's spiritual. This is ritual for me.'
Ritual is also taking things from the past and using them as memory-keepers to fuel how we move forward in the future. In an era punctuated with persistent loss, in times that continue to confound, our culinary rituals are a scrumptious bridge, one that connects us to what can never really be lost or forgotten if we insist on remembering.