All Children Love Macaroni and Cheese

Tested: Giada di Laurentiis' "Baked Macaroni and Cheese Cupcakes", Episode Giada's Kidz Kitchen: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/baked-macaroni-and-cheese-cupcakes-recipe/index.html

Result: No Go (Ea and Ciccio), Met with Great Enthusiasm (Rina)

This is one of the first universal "truths" about childhood that has been perpetuated by moms and chefs throughout the ages since the invention of macaroni and cheese (which must have been, let's face it, somewhere in the 1950's).  Upon closer scrutiny, we must include certain addenda to this monolithic statement.  My first observation: people fall into one of three possible mac n' cheese categories.  Perhaps, as my oldest daugther Rina, you are an unabashed enthusiast.  This means that you will eat any combination of pasta and cheeses, either melted together on the stove top or melted and then baked in the oven until golden and bubbly.  If you are part of this group, you are equally enthusiastic about macaroni and cheese that comes from the blue box as you are about the gourmet version that Paula Deen infuses with enough fat content to stop your heart as you watch her show in hi-def. 

If you are under the age of 15, you likely live in the same camp as my daughter Ea, who believes--and who could blame her?--that any pasta worth eating resides in those trademark tall, slender cardboard boxes, blue or otherwise.  No variations are allowed, either in pasta shape or cheese flavoring.  Oh, you might be able to get away with a cheese powder that isn't yellow, for instance; but don't go thinking that this person will sit at your table and polish off an alfredo version of the classic dish, or, say, rotini instead of elbows.  May God be with you if you try. 

Then there are the hard-core mac n' cheese heretics, the Arians of the pasta and cheese world who would deny the divinity of this staple dish.   Such people cannot be convinced that such a dish could be tasty or even remotely good for you.  My son, Ciccio, adheres to this philosophy.  So it is always with great amusement that I observe every television personality (chef or otherwise) tout the universal mangia-bility of this dish.  I have also been told that mac n' cheese is the ideal camouflage for undesirable foodstuffs, such as vegetables and other hideous fruits of the earth.  To use modern parlance: iGuffaw. 

But perhaps you don't understand my skepticism?  You are probably thinking, what food tragedy is lurking in her past that makes her so bitterly opposed to such an innocuous dish?  I should take this moment to identify myself a little bit more, to give you a better sense of who I am and dispel any suspicions that I, myself, have a thing against food.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

In my semi-large Italian-American family (there were seven of us all together--is that large?), food was absolutely about nourishment.  I remember my mother coming home from a full day's work and going immediately into the kitchen to make epic portions of chicken with tomatoes, onions and potatoes or legions of cutlets baked in the oven until they were crispy and juicy.  Her brood was hungry--and needed to be fed immediately! We did not eat out at all (who could afford it?)  and we did not eat much in the way of junk food or fast food. 

It didn't occur to my brothers and me that the food we got at home was quite different from what our "more" American friends ate at their houses.  The overcooked chicken tenders, canned vegetables and, of course, boxed macaroni and cheeses that they endured daily seemed like foreign cuisine to me.  My friends were also inevitably banned from drinking during dinner (so that they would eat more), a situation that distressed me then as much as, say, the idea of waterboarding distresses me now.  Everything that we ate in our house might have been recognized generically by our neighbors--seafood, pork, chicken, vegetables--but the form that they took in my mother's hands raised the raw ingredients to the outer limits of the American imagination. 

Seafood meant fresh blue crabs, chased around the kitchen floor by my brothers and me until a minute before they hit the boiling water; the beautiful white flesh of squid, purple tentacles dangling out of our mouths as we tried to make a sibling laugh hard enough to shoot drink out of his nose (yes, somehow we were allowed to eat and drink); mussels that my mother scrubbed up in the sink and steamed in a large pot on the stove.  The Gorton's fisherman did not know our address.  

Meatballs, yes.  But these were filled with raisins and pinoli nuts, a surprise that I cannot imagine would be very welcome to small children these days.  They were my father's favorite and because of my devotion to him, I preferred them above the regular ones.  The vegetables we prized resembled weeds rather than anything commercially sanctioned (though broccoli rabe is quite hip now).  Weeds and bread would be more than enough for a beautiful lunch.  Mac n' cheese?  Somehow, I don't remember it. 

I couldn't guess then what I know now.  Dinner is about more than food; it is the most efficient vehicle of tradition and culture, especially in a land that has none of its own to impart to its citizens.  Companies may tell us what to eat: the Jolly Green Giant and Mr. Gorton and the Blue Box will tell us what children like to eat (and should eat!) in the absence of families with a strong ethnic background and family members with a cultural memory.  You might think, then, that Ciccio's problem with mac n' cheese is my problem with it: its total lack of memorability, the homogenous blend of cheeses that came from who knows where. 

But that would imply that he hungered for something more authentic or culturally consistent. This, my friends, is simply not the case.  He doesn't like cheese.  He doesn't want pasta with "stuff on it".  So what we have here is a mom with a philosophy and a kid with a texture problem.  At the moment, we both concur: there has to be a better food substance for this boy.  At least we have pasta.  Now we just have find a suitable partner for it.