Layer some of the macaroni in a 5-quart baking dish top with a layer of Cheddar cheese. Cook elbow macaroni in the boiling water, stirring occasionally until tender yet firm to the bite, 8 minutes. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Today we can love it because it’s easy and even uses up leftover spaghetti. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). It was loved because it was exotic and different. But there was a time and place in our past when it was the recipe of the day. Undoubtedly, macaroni pie isn’t mac and cheese as today’s world knows it. To pick up the flavors at the end, shower the top with minced fresh oregano or parsley and add a big grind of black pepper. And should the spirit move you to add some meat to this recipe, what about chopped prosciutto or minced country ham? Sprinkle that on between the layers of pasta, custard, and good Parmesan cheese. My ingredients below are simple, but you could go crazy and season the pasta with some pressed fresh garlic or dried oregano. And here is where you can have fun with this recipe. Then I drained the spaghetti and tossed it with butter, but you could use olive oil if you like. I used 3-inch broken pieces of thin spaghetti because they cook in just four minutes. What I discovered is that this recipe is much easier to make than traditional mac and cheese, which requires a white (bechamel) sauce. Nathalie said she considers mac and cheese an important Thanksgiving side because it gives children “a familiar dish. She ate it with a salad, but it is normally only sufficient for a side dish. “I doubt she ever used a recipe, but this was a she made in a Pyrex pie plate. A banker and entrepreneur, she could only cook the basic Southern things her mother cooked,” said Nathalie. “Celeste Dupree was a matriarch of Social Circle, willowy and beautiful to her end in her 80s. There she became fond of the recipes that Southerners prepared. When Nathalie had graduated from the London Cordon Bleu and came back to the United States to open a restaurant, she settled in Social Circle. It seems her mother-in-law Celeste Dupree used to make it in Social Circle, Georgia. Nathalie - the award-winning author of Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking and teacher who started one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the South in Atlanta in the 1970′s - was reminiscing about macaroni pie. I was talking with my longtime friend Nathalie Dupree of Charleston, SC, recently. Hoop cheese is what most Southerners used as they adapted this recipe into their own homes, getting a little bit closer to the mac and cheese of today. Because these recipes called for turning the mixture into a pie pan, they took on the name “macaroni pie.” The choice of cheese is vague, but historians believe Jefferson’s enslaved chef, as well as Mary Randolph, would have used either a hard Italian cheese like Parmesan or a softer, cheddar-like hoop cheese because that is what was available throughout the South.
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