Article: Real Britannia: Nursery food for the Empire Absolutely Britannia: Macaroni Cheese

MACARONI CHEESE combines the verbal swagger of period imported Italian (and we know "macaroni" meant, roughly, "ponce" in the 18th- century Vauxhall Gardens world), with the compressed, rubbery, utilitarian sound of the most English word imaginable: cheese.

Dignified economy - cheese-paring - is a lost British art, entirely inconceivable to anyone under 40. It had a glorious language, equally lost. My two treasured examples were the Third Programme format "there now follows a short recital on gramophone records" intoned in that posh undertaker's National Emergency voice, school of Alvar Lidell; and Faber paper-covered editions.

Macaroni cheese is firmly anchored in this world for me, though ...

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