Macaroni & Cheese is one of those dishes that can test a marriage in its early days. For instance, my wife, whose taste and intuition about food is so good that I generally ask her advice—and mostly follow it—when faced with an unknown restaurant's menu, was biased against baked macaroni and cheese in favor of the looser, creamier, stove-top variety. (I don't mean the packaged kind—ick—but the real thing, homemade.) I, on the other hand, like most right-thinking people, knew that the real McCoy must come out of the oven, bubbling in a glass baking dish with fresh-made bread crumbs toasting on the top, and is stiff enough to eat with even a primitive fork.

Well, it took years of experimenting, but I found the balance that keeps us both happy. In fact, we both prefer it to anything we grew up with. It has a creamier, cheesier finish than traditional baked, but still has all the hearty richness. One key element is reserving a third of the shredded cheese and folding it in just before baking.

Now, this isn't diet food. The recipe is for “three servings,” but if you can prepare it for two people and let any of it go uneaten you have much better discipline than I do. If you are going to go off-diet to enjoy some mac’n cheese, you may as well enjoy it.

The choice of cheese is of course the high-order term in this equation. We have settled on Cabot white cheddar, available for instance at Costco. But cheddar is a deeply personal choice in a person's life, and I wouldn't presume to advise. Don't suppose, however, that the mustard or cayenne are optional. You'll never taste them as such, but their absence is like leaving the sparkle out of the champagne.