After about 500 years, in 1861, the Victorian cookbook “Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management” was published.
In this cookbook a recipe for Mac and cheese, somehow similar to today’s version, has been found. According to this recipe, Cheshire cheese and breadcrumbs are toasted on top of crooked-shaped pasta more similar to bucatini than macaroni.
Interestingly, Mrs Beeton says that macaroni is her “favorite food of Italy” and “Neapolitans regard it as a staff of life”.
This Neapolitan macaroni and cheese lineage theory was supported by French gourmand writer Alexandre Dumas, who stated that Naples was the official homeland of macaroni and cheese in his “Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine” (1873).
In his book, Dumas claimed that it was Catherine de Medici who spread the dish north while moving from Italy to France in the 1530s, bringing with her several food innovations.