Macaroni & Cheese: 52 Recipes from Simple to Sublime

Macaroni and cheese is the ultimate, all-American comfort food. Most Americans, especially children, are familiar with the version that comes out of the blue cardboard box, but acclaimed cookbook author Joan Schwartz has something to say about that in her collection Macaroni & Cheese. Schwartz has compiled over 50 original and inventive recipes from many well-known chefs and restaurants. Most of the recipes start off with a basic béchamel sauce (milk whisked into a roux) and add various domestic and foreign cheeses to the hot mixture, but some find room for more exotic ingredients, like truffles, duck prosciutto, oysters, sausage, and codfish. In addition, there's a glossary of almost 40 milk and goat cheese varieties that appear within the recipes. After sampling some of the more unusual recipes with such fascinating and complementary flavors, it will be time to put your standard assumptions about mac and cheese to rest, and put the blue box at the back of the pantry shelf. --Teresa Simanton