Juxtapose "Epic History" with "Macaroni and Cheese" and you are going to raise eyebrows. Without fail, during Q&A after a talk, someone asks, "Of all things—why macaroni and cheese?"

The answer begins with a distinction. Macaroni and cheese is not merely a food; it is a dish. Foods are commodities that move through trade routes and agricultural systems. Dishes are more complicated. They arise from techniques, habits, technologies, preferences, and cultural ideas and are sustained through meaning, memory, aspiration, and imagination. Few dishes have had such a long run. Fewer still have chameleoned their way through centuries, countries, and contexts to become the most beloved culinary icon on the American table—a very long way from its antecedents in Ancient Rome.

The venture was only meant to be a dalliance with the Italian origins of the dish, but flirtations have a way of deepening into entanglements one never quite anticipated. I soon found myself contending not only with the history of a recipe, but the histories embedded within its constituent parts: the power brokers of wheat cultivation and pasta-making, cheese makers and mongers, systems of trade and labor. As those stories cauliflowered, the dish itself became a vehicle for a journey through migration, religious strictures, industrialization, economic strife, and mass consumer culture. The dish and its ingredients were inseparable from the societies that shaped them. And they in turn participated in shaping societies.

What makes the dish so historically revealing is not that it remained fixed, but that it never did. Over centuries, macaroni and cheese was appropriated, adapted, industrialized, sentimentalized, mythologized, and repeatedly reinvented. Its staying power lies in its adaptability—not only to ever-evolving tastes and practices, but to the changing needs of society. Tasty is not enough to become a culinary icon. Such dishes must endure and perform real cultural work: signaling luxury and refinement in one era, getting families fed cheaply in another, and all the while retaining the deeply reassuring qualities we now call comfort food.

The forces of mobility—war, pilgrimage, ambition, migration, trade—propelled the dish across borders and through societies. Along the way, religion, industrialization, reform movements, scientific developments, and capitalism continually reshaped it. Again, the relationship was reciprocal. In each new setting, macaroni and cheese helped shape everyday ideas about nourishment, refinement, thrift, domesticity, and belonging.

The history of macaroni and cheese ultimately became far larger than the history of a recipe. It became a way of tracing how dishes enter the current of history, absorbing the pressures of their moment, gathering meaning as they pass from hand to hand, and eventually becoming part of the cultural vocabulary through which people understand themselves and a powerful witness to the way meaning is created and carried forward.

Ongoing thread. More from Karima Moyer-Nocchi to follow.