Mac in the Box

     The other afternoon I followed a rather detailed and lengthy recipe to make some home made macaroni and cheese for our evening meal.  I was heating, stirring, whisking, then stirring again as two different cheeses melted into a flour, butter and milk roux.  All the while in a separate saucepan the elbow pasta was boiling before being drained and added to the mix.  There were quite a few ingredients ranging from bay leaves and thyme, to Dijon mustard and Tabasco sauce.  But the final product was well worth all the effort.  It came out of the oven with a golden brown crust of Parmesan-Reggiano cheese and bread crumbs.  It was classic comfort food, to be sure.
     I knew that all my culinary ambition would create something that no store bought box of dried noodles, artificial cheese sauce and powdered ingredients could rival.  After all, macaroni and cheese recipes appeared in cookbooks dating back to the Medieval Age.  It is a food that transcends time & space, geography & culture.  At one time in 18th Century Italy it was considered a dish for only the upper class and was also enjoyed in the fashionable Parisian circles around the time of the French Revolution. 
     In America after our own revolution Thomas Jefferson liked mac and cheese so much that he had the ingredients imported from Europe for his kitchen staff so they could prepare it for formal dinner parties at Monticello.  His cousin, Mary Randolph, included the recipe in her 1824 cookbook, "The Virginia Housewife," and listed only 3 basic elements: macaroni, cheese, and butter. 
     It continued to be a tedious process to prepare until the Kraft Corporation developed the now famous packaged version in 1937 with the slogan on the box, "Make a meal for 4 in 9 minutes."  All of a sudden it was quick, easy and affordable.  Store shelves have are now lined with dozens of different varieties of America's comfort food.  Just take a look:

     But exactly how healthy is it, compared to the dish I took so long to make at home?  I went on line to check out the nutrition facts and discovered that my home made version is full of calories and fat and little else.  A 1 cup serving can contain as much as 420 calories!!!  But purchasing a packaged brand is nearly twice as bad.  Kraft Mac & cheese contains 800 mg of sodium per serving and 18 grams of fat while the store brand (Richfood) had over 700mg of sodium!  And the "healthy" brands (Annie's and Back to Nature) had 520mg and 660mg respectively of sodium in each cup serving.  But the absolute worst was the Richfood Deluxe Mac & Cheese with over a 1000 mg of sodium and 350 calories, 110 of them coming from fat and 24% of each bite containing saturated fat.

    

     So I consulted NuVal (more about the organization tomorrow) to determine what score they assign to the food we all crave.  They have developed a universal scale that calculates the nutritional value of food from 1-100 with one hundred being the best.  They gave Kraft mac & cheese a score of 5.  In comparison Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookies came in at 10.  There was a only a slight improvement when Kraft used whole grain pasta.  That improved the rating to 18.  But that's still not very good.  And the home made version, while not on the official list of store bought items nuVal rates, remains down near the bottom along with things like Chips Ahoy! Cookies.
     Knowing now what I have learned about one of my favorite adult comfort foods I guess I will have to be content to prepare it and enjoy it only on special occasions.  Just another one of life's pleasures that must be experienced with restraint.  Life can be so cruel...