The term “macaroni” was made popular in England around 1750 and applied to certain wealthy young men who wore outlandish clothes and ridiculously tall, decorated wigs. These foppish dandies picked up the term and the custom while traveling to Italy (being the origin of macaroni,) and brought it back home to show off their well-traveled worldliness and sophistication. So at first “macaroni” referred to the wig. Later it meant the wearer of the wig as well.
The home-Brits made them a mockery of sissified pretense and ridiculed them widely in cartoons.
A few years later those same Brits were mocking Americans for not knowing a real “macaroni” from an ordinary cap. When their little ditty had Yankee Doodle stick a feather in his cap and call it “macaroni” it showed him to be too stupid and unsophisticated to know that it was not. However, the Brits, knew otherwise, don’t you know.
The song “Yankee Doodle” has a long history. The American version was written, at least in part, by Dr. Richard Schackburg, a British army surgeon during the French and Indian Wars. Schackburg's lyrics were said to be composed to make fun of the colonials who fought alongside the British troops in that conflict. By the time of the American Revolution, making fun of dumb Yankees had become a national pastime for the British.
Apparently, it remains the pastime of snooty people everywhere who, like the snooty Brits of yesteryear and the American media of today, remain as clueless as ever.
“Doodle” originally meant a lazy simpleton or a stupid person. A “Yankee” was anybody from the northeastern American colonies and then afterwards any American anywhere. In the really deep South it designates anybody north of Memphis.
And get this —- the British even made fun of rag-tag American militiamen by playing "Yankee Doodle" as they headed toward the Battle of Lexington and Concord to kick off the American Revolution.
But look on the bright side …
Those lyrics probably helped the English underestimate the American “doodles” who would go on to whip them, good and hard, in a war for their independence. In the process the Yankees themselves adopted the tune “Yankee Doodle” and proudly blasted it back in the faces of the Brits. Today, it is the state anthem of Connecticut.
At Yorktown, French and American troops lined up on respective sides of a mile-long column of British soldiers on their way to stack arms and surrender. The British marched with their heads turned toward the French troops. They were trying to pretend the Americans did not exist.
The French ally, Marquis de Lafayette, commander of an American Light Infantry brigade, saw this and was outraged. He ordered his band to play Yankee Doodle. With a blast of drums and a swirl of fifes, the musicians hurled themselves into their favorite song. Every British head was jerked around, and they stared into the faces of their “doodle” colonials.
As for macaroni itself, the kind you eat, Italy had been that food’s site of origin even before Marco Polo set off on his 17-year visit to China. (This is what set off the centuries-long argument that the Chinese invented spaghetti.) That was in the year 1271, almost 500 years before the term was morphed into a word meaning a weird fashion among well-traveled English dandies.
The first macaroni dish served in America was macaroni and cheese, cooked up by Thomas Jefferson’s chef, James Hemings. It was based on a recipe Hemings may have learned in Paris while he was there with Jefferson. Hemings, who was Jefferson’s slave at the time, learned the art of French cuisine under some of that nations top chefs. Jefferson freed Hemings in 1796, after he had served his creations to president Jefferson and some of the nation’s founding fathers.
James was nineteen when he sailed to France with Jefferson, who then was America’s ambassador to that nation. Along on this trip were Jefferson’s daughter, Martha and James’ little sister, Sally, who went on to give birth to six of Jefferson’s children.
It is fascinating to see how intertwined are the subjects of macaroni and cheese with slavery in America and how Italy and France contributed to the popularity of this iconic dish on American tables for the last 250 years.
The cheese used in today’s version of macaroni and cheese typically is yellow cheddar but Hemings favored the use of Parmigiano Reggiano, which was essential to the original recipe he learned in France. This cheese was first identified in the year 1200 and is made according to strict rules within the region of Parma and Reggio Emilia in Italy. Even the cows who make the milk for this cheese have to reside in this area or it can’t be genuine Parmesan
So the next time you sit before a plate of this magnificent comfort food, remember old Hemings, the guy who made it a household word. And maybe give thanks that you have inherited this wonderful country from the simpleminded “doodles” who defeated the British Empire—- the home of all those sophisticated “macaronis”.
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