The Right Way to Make Mac and Cheese

My Aunt Louise and my grandmother both smoked Virginia Slims. At social events, even barbecues, Louise’s cigarette was in a theater-length holder. She was married to a loud man we called Uncle Benny, who held his Marlboro in the same hand as his highball. Louise’s kitchen, with its Talavera tile and swinging door, functioned like a VIP suite. It’s where the mac and cheese was made, and the very important people were the kids.

This was late-1970s Los Angeles. Louise and Benny lived in a gray Spanish-revival bungalow common to the multiracial Miracle Mile: a red-clay roof and a front courtyard tinkling with chimes. On any given weekend, a hunting pal of Benny’s might stomp onto Louise’s spotless back patio with just-caught cod, or crayfish still moving in the trap—maybe even deer heart, thawing in a ziplock, or fresh pheasant to throw on the grill.

It was fine for others to contribute a protein, but side dishes were Louise’s domain: deviled eggs, braised mustard greens, and the mac and cheese for which she was famous. I’d watch Louise fold boiled elbow noodles into the Cracker Barrel Extra Sharp I had shredded, plus eggs beaten with Knudsen whole milk (as opposed to Carnation evaporated). There were other ingredients—a spoonful of dry mustard, a pinch of Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning—but what stood out to me were Louise’s careful shakes, from a Schilling tin, of cream of tartar. I didn’t know what that was, and I wasn’t alone. For Louise’s clique, cream of tartar was a culinary idiosyncrasy. “Cream of what?” they’d ask. “Why?”

Now, decades later, rowdy debates about mac and cheese are all over social media, especially at holiday time. Should mac and cheese be pourable, or baked until it can be cut like brownies? Is truffle a grace note, or too highfalutin? The sparring goes down in TikTok Stitches and the comment sections of Instagram Reels, as creators mix in mozzarella or mascarpone. Home cooks zhuzh up boxes of Kraft. My Haitian American friends make macaroni au gratin with habanero-laced epis. Ina Garten marinates her cooked pasta in cream, as you would overnight oats. I adore a good, melty cube of Velveeta (in my scrambled eggs), but using Campbell’s Condensed Cheddar Cheese Soup? In mac and cheese? Gag me—as we used to say in 1980s Southern California—with a spoon.

Alex Hill, an L.A.-based content creator and recipe developer under the name @justaddhotsauce, knows that ingredients and cooking styles go in and out of fashion. She grew up watching her mother learn to make mac and cheese from the singer Patti LaBelle, a best-selling cookbook author whose recipe is a five-cheese stunner (and made in the custard style of my Aunt Louise). Hill’s mom, a Puerto Rican married to a Black American, wanted to make mac and cheese in a way beloved by her husband and his family. “I thought my mom made the best mac and cheese,” Hill, whose own mac is béchamel-based, told me. “She used Velveeta. And now it’s so taboo.”

My Aunt Louise was not kin but sister-friend to my maternal grandmother, Lottie. They were glamorous, frank, and 40 years older than me, but Louise spoke about the body in a way that shared DNA often disallows. When I was 12, she told me there was no way to grate cheese without risking the skin of my knuckles. “Stop being so tentative,” Louise said. “As you know, it’s not if you bleed, kiddo. It’s when.” I had thought that the way Louise looked out for me and other children meant that I knew her. I’ll never know how much I didn’t know.

My grandmother and her girlfriends came of age in 1940s California, when school segregation was customary (and legal, until ’47). Aunt Louise and Grandma Lottie both married military men and lived through the assassination era. I used to think of these women as always being braced for something. Tense. As we all got older, I could see they were shoring up a broken heart. People in my grandmother’s set rarely talked about their emotions, at least to us. They were who they were because things were the way they were.

Like Louise, my grandmother was a good cook who did not love to cook. But Grandma taught me to make a nog so thick with beaten egg whites that it’s eaten with a spoon. When I realized that she didn’t even like the nog, she told me that you don’t have to like something to make it. “You can make it,” she said, “because other people like it.” (I hear this in my head when I make my “famous” peach cobbler that I don’t even like. Compliments are yummy, though, right? Especially when you’re hungry for them.) Cooking for pleasure must have been a complex notion for my grandmother; her mother had cooked for a living in the Piedmont area of Oakland, where Black people were forbidden to be owners or tenants.

At one of Louise and Benny’s gatherings—where spatchcocked birds dripped with browned butter, brown sugar, and cayenne—I heard one of Louise’s friends getting nosy about the menu. This friend’s name was Mae or Bea, something one-syllable, and she was among the fools Louise welcomed but did not suffer, when it came to kitchen meddling.

Mae (or Bea): You’re not making a roux?

Louise: Roux is for gumbo and gravy.

Then one of Benny’s crew barreled through the swinging door with charred wild-turkey thighs. Before Louise could block him, the man stuffed a boy’s mouth with a burnt piece, then howled: “That’s a rabbit! That’s the Easter Bunny you just ate!” Now that child was crying. Then another. I wanted to fight this man. But I was 12.

In that kitchen, with its undernotes of Clorox, Louise looked up from dotting margarine on the steaming noodles in her rectangular glass pan. She didn’t like grown men “hooting and hollering.” She didn’t like jokes that only the joker found funny. Aunt Louise had spoken to me of the sourness among folks who experienced different levels of possibility, and freedom. This was why she didn’t much like for the generations to mix—unless she was on duty at the velvet rope.

So Louise hustled me, my sister, and our pals into her den. She passed me, the oldest, a boxy television remote, then fanned out editions of Ebony, Life, Essence, and Sunset. She brought us a bowl of chips and some mild salsa. Shutting the door as she left, Louise gave us a look that said simply and seriously that this was our territory while treacherous guests were nearby.

As usual, I followed her back to the kitchen. I noted how Louise contained the chaos. I was brave before the deer’s heart. I got back to cheese grating.

In the summer of 2000, when my sister was getting married, I visited Louise in a nursing home. She was a widow recovering—to the degree that she ever could—from an amputation. I had been living in New York City for seven years, and she acted as if that were a magical distance and length of time. My grandmother had told her I was doing well in my work—that I was, like the Jeffersons, moving on up. With a wink, Louise gave me a bottle of Rive Gauche from her bureau, and then asked me if I still cooked. I said I did, and I was glad it was true.

“I think we’re losing recipes,” Alex Hill had said, and for more than mac and cheese. Recipes aren’t just nourishment, nor are they merely strokes of “culture.” They are relationships. They make us feel included and protected. For me, they are loyalty—a sweetness where there might have been bitters. Hill, who has a cookbook coming out next year, knows the necessity of sharing her passions on social media, but she doesn’t want to cook something solely because it might go viral. “I actually want to cook,” she said. “I want you to cook my recipes.”

The elbows in Aunt Louise’s mac and cheese held cooked milk in their curves. My recipe is not the same as Louise’s, but it’s close. I use cream of tartar. I believe roux is for gumbo and gravy. I tilt my glass pan, just as Louise did, to see if any liquid moves. If it doesn’t, I pull it from the oven. The top, crunchy. The edges, brown. Our custard, silky.

Alex Hill says cream of tartar is a stabilizer.

Louise had told me that too, in her Miracle Mile courtyard. “Cream of tartar has no taste,” she said. “It just holds everything together.” At the time, I didn’t understand.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Right Way to Make Mac and Cheese.”