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Mrs Bailey’s Macaroni Cheese
Comfort food? Let me tell you about comfort food…
Every culture on every planet has its comfort foods. On the whole, they tend to be warm and filling; they don’t always hark back to childhoods, but it is a common feature.
On Mars as all through the Empire, a few people speak of nursery food with scorn — but only a few, and to some extent even they are posing. Even they have their heartfelt, heart-hidden passions, something soft or something sweet, something that lies as much in their memory as it does in their stomach, soothing and settling, be it a bowl of porridge or a soft-poached egg or a custard tart, whatever.
Macaroni cheese is a classic nursery comfort food, and Mrs Bailey’s version has comforted many a generation of homesick schoolgirls. And, let it be said, sometimes their mistresses too. Hers is a classic of its kind, made with a butter-and-flour roux; you can call it a Béchamel — heavens, once you’ve added the cheese, you could call it a Mornay — but Mrs B will have no truck with your nonsense. To her it’s a white sauce, and always will be. And she keeps it simple, at least until the milk has all gone in. After that, the world’s your oyster, as far as additives go.
NB: this recipe has no reliable measurements at all. Mrs B could make this blindfold, and she certainly hasn’t…