By Anne Mendelson

Cooling their heels in a Venetian jail in 1755, Giacomo Casanova and the prisoner in the cell above him contrived one of the more imaginative escapes in the annals of criminology. It involved transferring a heavy iron bolt, concealed inside an oversize Bible, from Casanova to his upstairs neighbor, who could then chip a hole in the wooden floor. The main flaw in the plan -- the ends of the bolt stuck out -- was audaciously overcome by putting the Bible under a very large, overflowing dish of macaroni with butter and cheese.

This episode is one of many captivating tidbits that enliven "The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America," an ambitious if uneven survey by Karima Moyer-Nocchi, a culinary historian and the author of "The Eternal Table," a worthy introduction to the history of food in Rome. At her best she displays alert intellectual curiosity and a strong engagement with her subject. The historical recipes sprinkled throughout the text in original or "remapped" (adapted) form are another attraction.

Ms. Moyer-Nocchi's finest work comes in two chapters probing the special relationship Americans have with macaroni and cheese. How did a recherché, quasi-French dish leave the skillful hands of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved cooks and wind up being popular grub for millions of today's cooks and consumers, white and -- emphatically -- black? Diligently rummaging through kitchen bibles, advertising copy, miscellaneous collectibles, sociological studies, medical opinions, exercises in old-plantation nostalgia and more, Ms. Moyer-Nocchi acquits herself well in the company of writers, including Jessica B. Harris, Toni Tipton-Martin and Adrian Miller, who have properly honored macaroni and cheese as a star in the black culinary constellation.

Her wide-ranging search for global relatives of the beloved dish unearths at least two fascinating specialties new to me, Scottish "macaroni pie" with mac and cheese in a pastry crust, and a very distant crustless Barbadian cousin called "Bajan macaroni pie," or simply "pie." The latter, featuring long pasta tubes with a farrago of bold seasonings, inspired me to try Ms. Moyer-Nocchi's recipe. The result was splendid -- but only after I'd compensated for a carelessly omitted detail about when to add 10 ounces of grated cheese.

Unfortunately, sloppy handling of details is one of two chief weaknesses besetting "The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese." Ms. Moyer-Nocchi repeatedly, bewilderingly sabotages her considerable achievements by not bothering to get small but significant particulars right. She mangles "tres orbiculos tractae siccas" (dry three small discs of tracta, a preparation of flour and water), from the Late Latin writer Apicius, as "tres orbicular trace siccas"; "loseyns isode" (boiled pasta sheets, a sort of protolasagna) in a Middle English recipe becomes "loosens is ode." A lemonless macaroni soup in "The Modern Cook," by the Victorian chef Charles Elmé Francatelli, is inexplicably called "lemony" and gets a "remapping" with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Ms. Moyer-Nocchi scolds Eliza Leslie, the seminal 19th-century American cookbook writer, for making macaroni rather than cheese the top layer in a recipe "To Dress Macaroni" -- "a regrettable innovation that made for bony macaroni" -- without observing that Leslie obviates the problem: She directs you to "cover the dish."

Documentation of sources is another unaccountable muddle. Ms. Moyer-Nocchi devotes much attention to a recipe for macaroni with Parmesan cheese in Elizabeth Raffald's 1769 manual "The Experienced English Housekeeper," but the book itself receives neither a reference note nor an entry in the bibliography. None of this would be as troubling in a work of lesser merits.

A separate problem is Ms. Moyer-Nocchi's eagerness to present "The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese" in an ideological framework. In handling culinary subjects, she writes, "we must engage in what is called Restorative History," so as to correct a dominant historiographic slant that "not only omits but actively distorts the experiences of marginalized and minoritized peoples."

I am not sure that Ms. Moyer-Nocchi pursues the restorative-history agenda very purposefully or that the macaroni-and-cheese story is a good fit for such arguments. In fact, the book may be all the better for not strictly sticking to what she calls "a methodologically rigorous form of historical recovery and reconstruction." But in this connection, I feel obliged to call attention to an unjustly neglected book issued in 2015 by an obscure Ohio publisher.

This work spotlights 18 very elderly women from different regions and social strata who entrusted an interviewer with their living memories of the Mussolini regime, World War II and Italy's emergence into an "economic miracle" era. For these survivors -- the grandmothers and great-grandmothers who populate many romantic fantasies -- "Italy" seldom meant idyllic country vistas and cardiologists' dream culinary joys. Both better-off and worse-off women were indelibly imprinted by childhood Saturdays dedicated to Fascist observances, later by the wartime horror of not knowing whether bombs and bullets were coming from the Blackshirts, the Germans or the Allies. Those who lived in the countryside were more likely to cherish memories of lard than olive oil; having a pig to slaughter could get a struggling family through the year. The edge of starvation was all-too-familiar territory, and peasant sharecroppers were so mercilessly victimized by the local padroni (landed proprietors) that when postwar prosperity dawned, many welcomed the freedom to leave the land for an urban factory job.

The book's title was "Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita," and its intrepid interviewer-compiler-translator-annotator was Karima Moyer-Nocchi. Even a few paragraphs of that work make the case for restorative history 10 times more powerfully than "The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese."

--Ms. Mendelson is the author of "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood."

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February 13, 2026 07:15 ET (12:15 GMT)

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