Head to your local cheesemonger (your kid will appreciate both word and job description) and get some Montgomery’s cheddar from England, or Vermont’s Cabot clothbound cheddar or Hook’s aged cheddar from Wisconsin. But it’s also an occasion to source the good stuff, to turn the production of your dinner into a kind of cheese-plate tasting menu. As with fondue, a pot of melted cheese sauce is by nature forgiving: You can grate whatever odds and ends you have in your cheese drawer into a pot and they can coalesce into something quite marvelous. The best reason for making mac and cheese is the cheese itself.
Most of all? You’ll want your kid to make it as soon as is reasonably possible. Also, if you’re going to make pot after pot of the stuff, it should be good. I have happy memories of attending elementary school basketball games with my younger daughter, whose love for ripe cheeses exiled us to the upper bleachers.) And as with many simple recipes, the dish hinges on the quality of its ingredients. A bowl of pasta loaded with cheese sauce is a 3-year-old’s version of the crispy baguette and excellent French Camembert that is for some of us a staple food of adulthood. As if by some collective agreement, the stuff becomes locked into our food psyches from an absurdly early age, the very definition of comfort food. If your household includes children, you likely lost count long ago of the number of bowls of macaroni and cheese you’ve made, ordered at restaurants, microwaved or poured out of a box.
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