This past weekend I had a chance to go out to eat, and my husband dragged me to a place he was dying to try because he had heard the macaroni and cheese was really good there. I knew he wasn’t going to find what he was looking for, but I went anyways and once again watched as his heart broke when he encountered a bunch of pasta with some cheese in it, bound together by a floury bechamel sauce. What he’s craving isn’t macaroni and cheese, it’s macaroni pie, and he begged me to put this up on the blog so that people could understand what “real” macaroni and cheese means. (A version of this post appears in part in the September issue of Esquire.)

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When most people say “mac and cheese” they think of creamy cheese sauce and macaroni noodles. But for a lot of Southerners, mac and cheese will always be macaroni pie, a dish I first really came to appreciate when visiting down in South Carolina.

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Macaroni pie is, essentially, a macaroni and cheese casserole, and while people in coastal South Carolina consider it their version of  “macaroni and cheese” and gag when asked to swallow what the rest of the country calls “macaroni and cheese” it’s actually a dish that is most associated with Jamaica, Trinidad and the Caribbean (some people even say Greece). The beauty of it is that all the measurements are by eye so it doesn’t scare non-cooks.

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Preheat the oven to 350, make a box of macaroni noodles, grease any baking dish or pie pan you have on hand, drain your noodles once they’re done and pour them into the baking dish. Cube a block of cheddar (or two blocks, or as much as you want) and mix with the noodles, making sure that a lot of the cheese winds up on top. Then pour in milk (skim, whole, 2%, it doesn’t matter) until you can see the milk rising up through the noodles. Throw it in the oven and let it bake until the top starts to brown. And that’s it. To make it fancy, add smoked cheddar or any other cheese and grate more cheese over the top to get a thick bubbling, crispy, golden brown crust.

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Cook it longer to make the top crispier, cook it shorter to keep it soupy, add sausage to the mix if that’s your thing, throw in a tomato if you want to pretend it’s healthy. Use mozzarella, smoked gouda, monterey jack – whatever cheese is your current romantic partner. The result is a moist pie with lots of pockets of oozing cheese studded throughout, and a crispy upper crust of crunchy macaroni and melted cheese.

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I’ve got a fondness for gooey, creamy macaroni and cheese myself, but the power of macaroni pie is not to be underestimated. It’s about as Southern as it gets.