Call It Macaroni
He [Parson Woodforde, writing in his diary c. 1820, in England] also, on more than one occasion, notes eating a somewhat exotic starch: "Maccaroni," which had been popularized in England by young men returning from the Italian portions of the Grand Tour. (Some of these aristocratic young men, in the mid-eighteenth cnetury, formed a club called the Macaroni Club, in which they met to reminisce about the Italian journeys and to calculate how best to shock their parents and the public at large. They adopted outrageous fashions designed to draw comment and succeeded admirably. They and their imitators were satirized and lionized in numerous series of prints, and "Macaroni" became a term for someone who was self-consciously fashionable or truly cutting edge. This is the reason that the song "Yankee Doodle" contains that odd, apparently nonsensical reference to macaroni. The song was originally sung by British soldiers to taunt the Americans: you are such bumpkins, the message ran, that you stick a stupid feather in your hats and think that's fashion.)
[Kirsten Olsen, Cooking with Jane Austen (Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut) 2005.]
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on Sunday, 30 April 2006 at 01.27
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Interesting — I have wondered what "macaroni" was doing in "Yankee Doodle."
This insight triggers the thought that, fashionwise, Elton John qualifies as macaroni and cheesey.