onions

Once upon a time, a couple of hundred years ago, macaroni was a big deal. A popular song even remembers how a young dandy called Yankee Doodle "stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni" -- meaning that he was trying to position himself way upmarket by suggesting that he was on the cutting edge of the newest and hottest fashion trends.

These days we tend to take macaroni for granted, relegating it to a very basic level of eating -- comfort food, at best. But it deserves better. There are places where they still remember that even very basic and simple pasta dishes can, by careful treatment, be elevated to far higher-than-usual status.

One of these places is Switzerland, the home of älplermagrone. The name doesn't translate perfectly into English. Magrone is of course macaroni, but Älpler doesn't only refer to the mountains and the people who live there, but more specifically to the men who would go up into the high pastures with the cows every summer. They stayed there for months at a time and lived on either what they had brought up with them on the upward journey, or what they got from the cows they were tending.

What they obviously had lots of was milk, butter and cheese (because they also made cheese every day from the fresh milk). The way this dish is prepared emphasizes how much milk they had: enough to boil the macaroni in, instead of water. And this treatment produces a surprisingly rich and tasty base for a dish that would really stick to the ribs at the end of a hard day's work in the open air.

The cheese of preference for this very exalted version of mac-and-cheese would naturally be Bergkaese, one of the hundreds of matchless mountain cheeses made by small dairies and smallholders in all the great Alpine regions. The Swiss cheese Sbrinz also works well. But if you can't get these, Emmental, Gruyere or (if you can get it) Appenzeller cheeses will all still produce a really nice result.

Fried onions to top it all off, and (often) apple slices or applesauce on the side, complete the dish.

Click on "read more" for the recipe.