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Article: Real Britannia: Nursery food for the Empire Absolutely Britannia: Macaroni Cheese
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- July 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1998 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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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 ...