After a mere hour at a 'quick boil', my pan boils dry, and I'm forced to move on to the next stage of the recipe, tipping the gluey mass into a dish, and sprinkling with a quite impressive amount of parmesan cheese and butter. It has little in common with anything I've made so far, but ticks a fair few boxes in the iSpy book of Victorian cooking cliches by instructing me to cook the macaroni, in a pan of milk and water, for 1½ to 1¾ hours, until 'quite tender'. It makes sense then, to turn to my trusty Mrs Beeton for a recipe, and she doesn't disappoint, with directions for macaroni 'as usually served with the cheese course', as well as as distinctly less pleasant sounding sweet milk pudding made with the stuff. It's all very refined, down to the parmesan topping, but I miss the velvety texture of the plain white sauce, and find the onion too bullyingly dominant: macaroni cheese should be something one could happily eat in bed, should opportunity call, and alliums and pillows should never mix. Bolder still, they suggest chucking in some sliced onion or leeks, softened in a little butter, along with a small bunch of chopped chives along with the sauce and pasta. This means infusing the milk with a bay leaf and black pepper before making the white sauce, and then adding a mature Lancashire cheese, as well as a slug of double cream.

The other is, that because 'almost all the joy of eating Macaroni Cheese comes from its creamy sauce', it's worth 'going to town' on the seasoning and an 'assertively flavoured' cheese. A few pointers, they insist, 'will help to make this familiar yet sometimes disappointing dish into superior comfort food.' Photograph: Felicity CloakeĪfter pointing out that there's 'very little to get wrong here', Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham deliver a googly in The Prawn Cocktail Years by calling for penne, rather than macaroni 'because the cheese sauce is better able to flow inside this larger-sized pasta'. Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham recipe macaroni cheese.

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