Who Invented Mac and Cheese? Not Jefferson, and Not Kraft

Nobody invented mac and cheese, at least nobody with a name. Pasta boiled and layered with grated cheese and butter is written down in The Forme of Cury, a recipe roll compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of England's King Richard II, and an Italian cookbook described much the same thing about 80 years before that. Thomas Jefferson did not invent it. Neither, on the evidence, did James Hemings, and Kraft only put it in a box.

The American part of the story is still worth telling. It has a pasta machine sketched by a future president, a congressman who thought his macaroni was full of onions, and a cook who bargained for his freedom.

Did Thomas Jefferson invent mac and cheese?

No. The usual version goes like this: Jefferson fell for macaroni while he was American minister to France from 1785 to 1789, brought it home, and served it at the President's House.

Some of that is true. Jefferson was fixated on pasta. Around 1787 he wrote that "the best pasta in Italy" was "made with a particular sort of flour, called Semola, in Naples," and he drew a diagram for a machine to make it. The sketch is in his papers at the Library of Congress.

Twenty years later he was still buying the stuff. On December 30, 1809, he wrote to Gordon, Trokes & Company, grocers in Richmond, that he had been getting macaroni from John Sartori's works in Trenton, New Jersey, at 16 cents a pound. His order to the Richmond firm included 20 pounds of it.

Being a keen customer is a long way from inventing a dish. English cooks were printing macaroni with cheese before Jefferson ever reached Paris. The macaroni recipe that survives in his handwriting has no cheese in it at all. Dwayne Yancey, writing for Cardinal News in 2022, reports that Monticello's own researchers think it was probably one of his cooks' recipes, not his.

The "pie called macaroni" of February 1802

The one eyewitness account of macaroni at Jefferson's table comes from Manasseh Cutler, a Massachusetts congressman and minister who kept a diary. On Saturday, February 6, 1802, he dined with the president and wrote down the menu: rice soup, a round of beef, turkey, mutton, ham, a loin of veal, fried eggs, fried beef.

And one dish he did not know: "a pie called macaroni, which appeared to be a rich crust filled with the strillions of onions, or shallots, which I took it to be, tasted very strong, and not agreeable." He asked about it. "Mr. Lewis told me there were none in it," Cutler wrote. It was "an Italian dish," and what looked like onions "was made of flour and butter, with a particularly strong liquor mixed with them."

Cutler gives no first name. Meriwether Lewis had been Jefferson's private secretary since April 1801, so he is the likely explainer.

This entry gets quoted as the debut of American mac and cheese. Look at what it actually says. Cutler never mentions cheese in the pie. The only cheese in the entry is "the great cheese" he went to see after tea: a 1,235-pound wheel that the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts, had sent the president. The pie may have had Parmesan in it, and a New Englander meeting Parmesan for the first time might well call it strong. But the diary does not say so.

James Hemings and the macaroni and cheese claim

The popular correction to the Jefferson story is that the real inventor was James Hemings. It is a better story than the Jefferson one, and about half of it holds up.

Hemings was born into slavery in Virginia around 1765. His mother was Betty Hemings. His father was, in the Library of Congress's words, "most probably" John Wayles, who was also the father of Jefferson's wife Martha. That made him Martha's half-brother and an older brother of Sally Hemings.

In 1784 Jefferson took him to Paris, at 19, to be trained in French cooking. He apprenticed with pastry cooks and other specialists, paid for his own French lessons, and became chef de cuisine at Jefferson's house on the Champs-Elysees.

He came back in 1789 and cooked for Jefferson in New York and Philadelphia, for wages. Then comes the document. On September 15, 1793, in Pennsylvania, Jefferson put in writing a promise to free Hemings once he had gone to Monticello and trained a replacement. The replacement was his younger brother Peter.

It took about two years. On February 5, 1796, Jefferson freed him and paid his way back to Philadelphia. On February 20, Hemings wrote out an inventory of the Monticello kitchen's pots and utensils, in his own hand. The Library of Congress holds it.

What the record does not show

There is no macaroni recipe signed by James Hemings, and no letter or account saying he made the dish. The claim rests on a chain of reasonable guesses. He was the trained French cook, Jefferson liked macaroni, somebody in that kitchen cooked it, and what Hemings knew he taught Peter.

That makes him a strong candidate for the first person to cook macaroni in Jefferson's household. It does not make him the inventor of a dish already in English cookbooks. He also cannot have made the pie Cutler disliked.

In 1801 Jefferson asked him to cook at the President's House. Hemings, by then working in Baltimore, did not take the job. He spent about six weeks in the Monticello kitchen and went back to Baltimore, where he died that year, aged 36. On November 5, 1801, a Baltimore friend of Jefferson's, William Evans, wrote that Hemings had killed himself after being "delirious for some days," and that "drinking too freely" was thought to be the cause. That letter is most of what we know, which is why accounts of his death differ.

In Virginia houses like Jefferson's, the people who did the actual cooking were mostly enslaved, a pattern that runs right through the story of soul food.

Where does mac and cheese come from?

Italy first, then England, as far as the written record goes.

The Liber de Coquina is a Latin cookbook usually credited to a cook from the Naples area. It survives in two manuscripts in Paris, the older one dated to about 1304 to 1314. Its recipe "De lasanis" says to roll fermented dough as thin as you can, cut it into squares three fingers wide, and boil them in salted water.

The squares are layered with grated cheese, and spices if you like, until the dish is full. You eat it with a pointed wooden stick. That is closer to lasagne than to elbows, but the idea is there.

The Forme of Cury follows around 1390. Its recipe is called "makerouns" in some copies and "Macrows" in the edition Samuel Pegge printed in 1780. It begins: "Take and make a thynne foyle of dowh. and kerve it on peces." The pieces are boiled, then laid in a dish with grated cheese and butter below and above. Pegge was unsure of the title and noted that the Italian maccherone "corresponds nearly enough with our process." The roll comes from the same court kitchens as the dishes in our piece on medieval recipes.

Then there is a long gap until Elizabeth Raffald. Her Experienced English Housekeeper, printed in Manchester in 1769, has a recipe "To dress Macaroni with Permasent Cheese." The macaroni is boiled, simmered for five minutes with cream and a lump of butter rolled in flour, then covered with toasted Parmesan. She adds a warning: serve it on a water plate, "for it soon goes cold."

That is recognizably the modern dish, sixteen years before Jefferson took up his post in Paris. (For the other half of the dish, see who discovered cheese.)

Mary Randolph prints it in 1824

The first known American printed recipe is in The Virginia House-Wife, which Mary Randolph published in 1824. It is a few lines long. "Boil as much macaroni as will fill your dish, in milk and water, till quite tender," she writes. Then drain it, salt it, layer it with cheese and butter, and bake it.

The next recipe, "Mock Macaroni," tells the cook to break crackers into pieces and soak them in milk "as a substitute for macaroni." Real macaroni was evidently not always on hand.

Randolph was family to Jefferson: her brother Thomas Mann Randolph was married to his daughter Martha. The culinary historian Karen Hess called her book the most influential cookbook of the 19th century. Randolph sometimes gets the inventor's credit too. She has no better claim than Jefferson. She wrote down what Virginia kitchens were already making, and those kitchens were run largely by enslaved cooks.

When was Kraft mac and cheese invented?

The box goes back to 1916, when James L. Kraft of Chicago won a patent for a way of making processed cheese that kept without a refrigerator. During the Depression a salesman in St. Louis had the idea of selling cheese and pasta together. According to Sasha Chapman's history of the product in The Walrus, he wrapped rubber bands around packets of grated Kraft cheese and boxes of pasta and "persuaded retailers to sell them as a unit."

Chapman dates Kraft Dinner to 1937, promising to feed a family of four for 19 cents. Other accounts put the first American sales in 1936, at 15 cents a box. The launch details are less settled than most quick histories suggest.

The box kept in a pantry for about ten months and needed no oven. Then the war came. Wartime rationing and shortages made meatless dinners common, and a cheap box of macaroni was an easy one.

Why is mac and cheese a Thanksgiving side?

Mostly it depends on where you live. In 2020 the career site Zippia looked at Google searches in every state for holiday side dishes. Cardinal News, reporting the results, found macaroni and cheese on top in six states running from the Mid-Atlantic to the Southeast, "from Delaware to Georgia," with Virginia among them.

That is the same stretch of country where Randolph's book was written and where cooks like Hemings worked. None of it goes back to 1621, but then neither does most of what we eat at Thanksgiving. In Virginia, where Randolph printed her three-ingredient recipe in 1824, macaroni and cheese came out as the most popular holiday side of all.

Questions people ask

What is the oldest known mac and cheese recipe?

The Forme of Cury, a recipe roll compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of England's King Richard II, describes dough cut into pieces, boiled, and laid in a dish with grated cheese and butter above and below. An Italian Latin cookbook, the Liber de Coquina, describes boiled squares of dough layered with cheese about 80 years earlier.

Why do people connect Thomas Jefferson with macaroni and cheese?

Jefferson was devoted to pasta. He sketched a pasta machine around 1787 and was still buying macaroni from a Trenton, New Jersey maker in 1809. In 1802 a guest, Manasseh Cutler, recorded a "pie called macaroni" at the President's House. Cutler never mentioned cheese in it, so the link to the modern dish is an assumption.

Did James Hemings invent macaroni and cheese?

There is no evidence of it. James Hemings trained as a French cook in Paris and ran Jefferson's kitchens, so he may well have cooked macaroni there. But no recipe or letter names him as its maker, and English cookbooks such as Elizabeth Raffald's 1769 volume had printed macaroni with Parmesan long before.

What is the first American mac and cheese recipe?

The first known American printed recipe is in Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife, published in 1824. She tells the cook to boil macaroni in milk and water until tender, then layer it with cheese and butter and bake it. She was recording what Virginia kitchens, run largely by enslaved cooks, were already making.

When did Kraft start selling boxed macaroni and cheese?

Sources disagree on the exact year. Sasha Chapman's history in The Walrus dates Kraft Dinner to 1937 at 19 cents for a family of four, while other accounts put the first American sales in 1936 at 15 cents a box. Kraft's founder James L. Kraft had patented a shelf-stable processed cheese in 1916.

Filed under Origin Stories, Cultural Identity