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Mac and Cheese

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic (by 2 people)   Your rating: 1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic

Ranked #1262 in Food, #32256 overall

Rated G. (Control what you see)

America's Favorite Comfort Food

 

It's commonly accepted that our 3rd President, Thomas Jefferson, created the first Macaroni and Cheese dish and served it in the White House in 1802, but food historian Karen Hess says it just isn't so! She claims that Jefferson brought the dish to America with him from Paris, where he had purchased a pasta mould, but did the French indeed use cheese in their dish? Who knows!

Kraft introduced the dish in 1937 under the brand name "Kraft Dinner", just around the time war rationing of milk and dairy products were taking effect, but they didn't introduce their famous blue box until years later. In the US, this Mac & Cheese staple is now known as Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, but in Canada it is still sold under the name Kraft Dinner. In the US, it is called Kraft Cheesey Pasta.

Today, Kraft Foods, Inc. sells more than 1 million boxes of Macaroni & Cheese each day.

Annie's Homegrown is the second largest producer of boxed Mac & Cheese products in the US. 

Please do bookmark the page as it is a work in progress and I will be adding to it frequently.

Mary Randolph's Macaroni & Cheese Recipe 

From "The Virginia Housewife", published in 1824

This is one of the earliest known recipes for macaroni and cheese. In the early 1800s, home cooks didn't worry so much about the exactitude of ingredients, so details are somewhat sketchy. You can't get any simpler than this.

INGREDIENTS:

* macaroni
* cheese
* butter

PREPARATION:
Boil as much macaroni as will fill your dish, until quite tender. Drain and sprinkle a little salt over it. Put a layer of macaroni in your baking dish, put on it slices of cheese, and on that a few bits of butter, then macaroni, cheese, and butter, until the dish is full, put on the top thin slices of cheese, bake in a 400° oven for 20 to 30 minutes.

Just How Important Is that Blue Box? 

Kraft Foods Branding Mishap

The choice of color should be dictated by well-defined brand positioning objectives. When color is used inappropriately or doesn't support a brand's positioning, it can damage brand equity.

Kraft Foods, Northfield, IL, faced just such a problem in the 1980s. At that time, the Kraft logo was the brand manager's play toy. Any color was up for grabs and no consistent standards were in place. By the middle of the decade, Kraft no longer enjoyed instant brand recognition.

Indeed, in conducting proprietary research to evaluate the problem, the company learned that consumers had trouble finding sought-after Kraft products due to frequent package design changes. An example of this misuse of color centers on the company's flagship macaroni and cheese product, whose highly recognizable blue package has helped it to cement a place as one of America's best-selling food products.

In a major packaging misstep in the mid-1980s, the brand's frozen counterpart was introduced in an elegant brown box with skillfully crafted typography (see photo, p. 158). However, it resulted in lackluster sales. When the packaging color was altered to closely emulate the shelf-stable blue box, sales of the frozen product rose. In 1985, recognizing the problem of inconsistent use of colors across its product portfolio, Kraft made the decision to establish a uniform standard identity for its logotype, including a color system which remains intact nearly 15 years later. Here, color works hard. The red, white and blue logo may not be a fashion statement, but it permits Kraft brands to be quickly identified across multiple categories, in every retail point of distribution in the U.S.
From The Color Of Branding

Reader Feedback & Recipes 

Add your favorite Mac & Cheese recipe here!

Just about everyone has their own favorite Macaroni & Cheese recipe, so if' you've got one to share, please feel free to add it to the guestbook! Also, if you have any comments about my lens, I'd love to hear it :)

stargazer00

I love Mac and Cheese, the ultimate comfort food! Kraft boxed mac and cheese, Stouffer's frozen mac and cheese. It's all good!

Posted July 04, 2008

entophile

MMMM...cheesy.

Posted July 13, 2007

Macaroni & Cheese in the blogosphere 

Because everyone loves mac & cheese

Indulge this weekend - Gourmet Mac and Cheese
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Mac and Cheese w/ lite cheddar?
Another suggestion: when you want to lighten up your mac and cheese, by all means substitute a good...
Mac and Cheese w/ lite cheddar?
don't shoot me, but a lot of people like to use *gulp* velveeta to make smooth creamy mac... velveet...
Mac and Cheese w/ lite cheddar?
Cabot it is, for the next round of mac & cheese! I have a potluck coming up in a couple of weeks. Sa...

News about Macaroni & Cheese 

Yes, journalists really do take the cheesy goodness seriously.

Lunchbox Revival: Mac 'n' cheese on a diet
But, no, mac 'n' cheese doesn't have to be bad for you. This healthy lunch dish is made...
Nota Bene makes a foodie's heart beat faster
Having subsisted for the summer on the likes of mac 'n' cheese, fajitas and overcooked chick...
Mac and cheese study reveals Canada's social inequality
... the perceptions of Kraft Dinner, a popular macaroni and cheese kit, by "food-secure" C...
Getting a kick out of a reading kick
In college, I was on an Easy Mac N' Cheese kick. Just a little bit of water, our trusty microwav...
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