Josh Barrie’s dishes that can do one: Posh mac and cheese
Overcomplicated: additions tend to make mac and cheese worse, not better (Pixabay)
Given the nature of things in modern Britain, dishes like mac and cheese will soon be all we have left. The tomatoes are gone, so too are the cucumbers. Apparently broccoli and cauliflowers are also in short supply, joining lettuces and salad bags, raspberries too, as our country sinks passively — though perhaps not regrettably — into the warming sea.
Some might welcome our new land of macaroni, never mind the bureaucratic calamity. Forking those dainty tubes of pasta, two thirds overcooked, one third dry and brittle, peeking their little heads over the parapet of near-curdled sauce, has become a mainstay of British eating and the dish is willingly harvested year-round. In “gastropubs” and brasseries, from upscale cafés to expensively elegant hotel dining rooms, mac and cheese is found, breadcrumbed to the hilt and as one dimensional as an online dispute about Shamima Begum.
Unfortunately, mac and cheese is another boring dish in an increasingly boring nation. If you look into the kaleidoscope of Britain, you will find a jarring view containing, among other unsavoury particulars, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s wiry spectacles, tobacco-imbued mustard trousers, and one of Jeremy Vine’s interminable cycling videos. And then there, suddenly, as the cogs turn and Farage’s frog-like mouth recedes, is a miniature cast iron skillet, wet and oozing, bubbling over with drowning macroni, a waft of truffle oil hammering your nostrils like a gap year in Colombia.
A miniature cast iron skillet arrives, a waft of truffle oil hammering your nostrils like a gap year in Colombia
Macaroni cheese is a lacklustre, sluggish dish. It is neither an interesting starter (£10.50?) nor an appropriate side (£7?). Too often, it lacks nuance, a careless medley of oil and singular flavour, too sickly to have in its entirety and too overpowering to sit comfortably alongside a fine piece of sole or a decent…
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