Thomas Jefferson is often credited with bringing macaroni and cheese to the American table, but Monticello, his home and today a museum, says that is not so. Its encyclopedia entry states that Jefferson did not invent the dish and was not the first to bring pasta to America.
The real story is more interesting, and it centers on a macaroni machine that Jefferson wanted from Italy. It also includes a recipe, an 1802 dinner and a cook who may have known more about pasta than the president did.
What Monticello says about the myth
According to Monticello’s entry on macaroni, pasta was already known in Britain and its colonies in the 1700s. Cheese-baked pasta was also popular in France by the time Jefferson arrived there in 1784. In other words, the dish did not begin with him.
Wikipedia’s article on the dish traces its roots to cheese and pasta casseroles in medieval England. It notes that Elizabeth Raffald’s 1769 book, The Experienced English Housekeeper, includes a recipe that mixes macaroni with a béchamel sauce, tops it with Parmesan and bakes it until golden. That is decades before Jefferson became president. Casserole fans can compare the idea with 9 casseroles that defined American family dinners.
The same article says Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook, The Virginia House-Wife, has a recipe titled macaroni and cheese. It uses three ingredients, macaroni, cheese and butter, layered and baked in a hot oven. The book appeared about two years before Jefferson died.
The 1789 pasta machine
The part of the legend that holds up involves equipment. Monticello says William Short wrote to Jefferson in February 1789 to say he had procured a “mould for making maccaroni” in Naples at Jefferson’s request and sent it to Paris. The mold probably arrived after Jefferson had left France, and it likely traveled with belongings shipped to Philadelphia in 1790. A packing list from around May 1793 records the machine among packages that were sent on.
Jefferson also wrote down how the device worked. His undated notes, indexed by Founders Online, describe a round iron box with a perforated underside. A screw presses a stiff paste through the holes, and a lever fits into one of 4 or 6 holes to turn it. A strong wooden frame fastened to the wall, floor and ceiling holds the press, and interchangeable plates with different hole shapes can produce different kinds of macaroni.
The notes say the best macaroni in Italy uses a flour called semola, made in Naples, and that good-quality flour that is not ground extremely fine works well elsewhere. The paste goes in batches of about 5 or 6 pounds, with less yeast than bread uses. Once the strands are long enough, they are cut and spread out to dry. Readers who like kitchen gadgets may enjoy 20 clever kitchen tricks for home cooks, and the baked version has its place among 11 Thanksgiving side dishes.
The Library of Congress and the inventor
The Library of Congress holds Jefferson’s papers and has written about his pasta project. A Library of Congress blog post from Dec. 2, 2019 says that around 1787 Jefferson wrote that the best pasta in Italy “is made with a particular sort of flour, called Semola, in Naples.” It adds that he began a treatise on making a macaroni maker and later had a similar machine at Monticello, with his sketch and design notes held by the library’s Manuscript Division.
The same post describes Jefferson as an inventor and tinkerer. It lists a swiveling Windsor chair, a folding campstool, an improved plow and the portable lap desk he used to write the Declaration of Independence. It also says he served as American minister to France from 1785 to 1789 and came home with a taste for continental cooking, then had his cooks trained in French techniques.
Stories like this one fill a whole genre of food history. A roundup of 12 stories from history people keep getting wrong shows how often a famous name gets attached to a dish or a habit. Humble dishes also cross into fancy dining rooms, as in 15 poor people foods that even the wealthy eat.
The recipe and the people who cooked
Monticello’s entry includes a handwritten macaroni recipe from Jefferson’s papers. It calls for 6 eggs, including yolks and whites, 2 wine glasses of milk, 2 pounds of flour and a little salt. The entry says it was probably dictated to Jefferson by an enslaved chef, such as James Hemings or Edith Hern Fossett. The recipe says only to dress the pasta as maccaroni, which the entry explains means layering it with cheese, and no type of cheese is named.
James Hemings was Jefferson’s enslaved manservant, and Monticello says he would likely have learned to make cheese-baked pasta during his culinary training in Paris. Wikipedia presents a theory that Hemings brought the recipe from France after Jefferson became interested in extruded pasta, but it labels that a theory rather than a confirmed fact.
The entry also quotes the 1802 journal of Manasseh Cutler, who described “a pie called macaroni” at the president’s dinner. Cutler did not care for it. Monticello notes that the dish was made of crust, not pasta with cheese, which is a reminder that the word macaroni could mean different things in 1802.
How the dish became a staple
Pasta itself had a long history in Italy. Wikipedia’s article on pasta says Venice issued the license for the first pasta factory in 1740, and it dates the first written record of pasta with tomato sauce to Francesco Leonardi’s cookbook in 1790. The same article describes the Marco Polo story as a myth many historians reject.
The boxed version came much later. Wikipedia credits Grant Leslie, a St. Louis salesman, with the earliest known boxed version, saying he attached processed cheese to pasta boxes with rubber bands to boost sales. Kraft hired him and launched its macaroni and cheese in 1937 with the slogan “make a meal for four in nine minutes.”
That timeline puts the American mac and cheese story across several centuries and several kitchens: medieval England, 18th-century cookbooks, Virginia in 1824, a St. Louis salesman in the 1930s. Jefferson’s real contribution was narrower. He was an early, enthusiastic American with a machine, a set of notes and cooks trained in French methods.
For anyone planning a Thanksgiving table, the lesson is simple. A baked pasta side dish has a long family tree, and the version on the table owes as much to Raffald, Randolph and a century of home cooks as it does to a founding president. The dish’s earliest champions were cooks, and Monticello’s own research gives credit where it is due.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
