Comfort Food

In this episode, I celebrate my annual Macaroni and Cheese Day by making a delicious batch of baked macaroni and cheese from the 1973 McCall’s Great American Recipe Card Collection. This episode discusses the possible origins of cheese, how cheese has changed through the ages, a little bit of science, some archaeology, and Charlemagne’s reaction to blue cheese the first time he ate it.

You can’t go wrong with a slightly patriotic recipe card collection in which there’s a recipe for a clown ice cream sundae!

Baked Mac and Cheese 1

Baked Mac and Cheese 2

The finished dish. I forgot to take a picture until after the first serving was extracted, but it’s better than nothing.

Learn more about the prehistoric cheese strainer:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/12/13/167034734/archaeologists-find-ancient-evidence-of-cheese-making

Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking:
http://www.amazon.com/On-Food-Cooking-Science-Kitchen/dp/0684800012

Since it’s officially Lent, I thought that I would cook up some tuna casserole. This recipe was originally developed by Minute Rice in the mid-1950s. It appeared in Time Magazine in 1955 and on the back of Minute Rice boxes starting in 1957. I initially found the recipe in Ceil Dyer’s book Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Jars which was published in 1979. While cooking, I talk about the different types of food preservation and the history of canning.