Gratin de Macaronis

Baked macaroni with cheese and a white sauce belongs to the long European history of dressing pasta with cheese, and the French gratin de macaronis is its classic Gallic form, built on béchamel — the mother sauce of butter, flour and milk codified in the French repertoire and named, by tradition, for the 17th-century financier Louis de Béchameil, though the attribution is legend rather than fact. Cheese-and-cream baked macaroni recipes appear in French and English cookery from the 18th century, and the dish travelled with French and English cooking to America, where it evolved into the cheddar-rich mac and cheese popularised in the United States. The French version stayed truer to its sauce-based, mountain-cheese roots, an everyday gratin rather than a dish in its own right.

Cut into it and the macaroni comes away creamy and bound, each tube coated in a smooth, mild béchamel rather than swimming in melted cheese, with the nutty savour of Gruyère running through. The top is the prize: a deep-gold, lightly crisp crust of browned cheese over the soft, saucy pasta beneath. It is gentle and comforting — milkier and subtler than the sharp, stretchy American mac and cheese, the flavour more of cream and roux than of strong cheese. A grating of nutmeg and a good crust lift it. A thin or under-seasoned béchamel leaves it bland and loose.

The dish lives on the béchamel and the bake. A roux — equal butter and flour cooked together until it smells nutty but stays pale — is whisked with milk and simmered so the flour starch gelatinises and thickens the milk into a smooth, glossy white sauce; cooking out the flour first is what keeps it from tasting raw and pasty. Grated hard cheese stirred into the warm sauce melts smooth (a roux-bound sauce resists the greasy splitting that pure melted cheese suffers), turning béchamel into a light sauce Mornay. The macaroni is boiled just short of done because it finishes cooking in the oven, drinking sauce as it goes. Under the grill or in a hot oven the exposed cheese and sauce brown through the Maillard reaction into the crust, while the interior stays creamy.