maccherone

Macaroni derives from Italian maccheroni (plural of maccherone), but the deeper etymology is one of the most contested in food linguistics. Several theories compete. One traces the word to Greek μακαρία (makaria), a barley broth associated with funeral feasts, itself from μακάριος (makarios, 'blessed, happy') — the idea being that the blessed food of the dead gave its name to a pasta. Another derives it from late Greek μακαρώνεια (makaroneia), meaning 'food made from barley.' A third, more prosaic theory connects it to Italian maccare (to crush, to knead), describing the physical process of working dough — which would make maccherone simply 'a thing that has been kneaded.' The Arabic maqaruna, naming a similar food, may represent an independent derivation or a borrowing in either direction. No single etymology has achieved scholarly consensus, and the word's true origin may be irretrievably lost in the medieval Mediterranean's multilingual kitchen.

What is clear is that by the fourteenth century, maccheroni was an established term in Italian cuisine, appearing in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353) in a passage describing the mythical land of Bengodi, where 'a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese' is topped with people who do nothing but make maccheroni and ravioli. The word originally referred to various forms of pasta — not specifically the small, curved tubes that English speakers associate with it — and the Italian plural maccheroni could name any shaped pasta made from durum wheat semolina and water. The tubular form that English identifies as macaroni developed later, the hollow shape designed to trap sauce and provide a satisfying bite. Italian regional pasta traditions produced hundreds of shapes, each with its own name and its own logic, but maccheroni became the generic term that traveled best, the word that foreign languages borrowed to name the entire category.

Macaroni entered English in the sixteenth century and acquired a remarkable secondary meaning in the eighteenth: 'macaroni' became slang for an extravagantly fashionable young man who affected Continental European (particularly Italian) tastes in dress, food, and manner. The Macaroni Club of London, established in the 1760s by young men who had completed their Grand Tour of Europe, gave its name to this fashion phenomenon. These 'macaronis' wore elaborate wigs, tight clothes, and carried themselves with an exaggerated elegance that conservative English society found ridiculous. The American song 'Yankee Doodle,' composed during the Revolutionary War, mocks an American who 'stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni' — that is, who thought a feather was the height of fashion. The insult only works if the listener knows that 'macaroni' means fashionable, a meaning that has since been almost completely forgotten.

The trajectory of macaroni in American culture reached its zenith with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, introduced in 1937 during the Great Depression and priced at nineteen cents per box. The product democratized what had been a moderately elaborate dish — baked macaroni with cheese sauce was a staple of nineteenth-century American cookbooks, including those compiled by Thomas Jefferson, who had encountered pasta in Italy and brought a pasta machine back to Monticello. Kraft's boxed version, with its bright orange powdered cheese sauce, became one of the most consumed foods in American history. The word that may have begun as a Greek funeral broth, that briefly named the most extravagant fashion in Georgian London, ended up on a blue box in every American pantry — a journey from the blessed dead to the frugal living, from makaria to macaroni and cheese, from elegy to comfort food.