Last week, on Annual Summertime Cookout Day, aka Independence Day, aka We As an Enlightened Society Decided That Monarchy Was a Bad Idea, at Least Until the Early 21st Century Day, I got to thinking about macaroni salad. Eleven years ago almost to the day, I made a macaroni salad for a friend’s cookout. It was my first year living on my own and I was just starting to cook for myself, recalling things I saw in my kitchen at home and reveling in the freedom of being inexpert, unbounded by rules or tradition or, most importantly, grand expectations. I was an excited cook, and I used unsustainable quantities of garlic in my food. It is my firm belief that there is a phase in every young cook’s life when everything tastes good because everything tastes like a shit-ton of garlic. It gets old after a while, because you’re going to want to taste things besides garlic, and most cooks will grow out of it. But for a spell, you’re convinced there’s nothing better. So I made this macaroni salad. And it tasted like a shit-ton of garlic, because I used a shit-ton of garlic. Garlic powder, even, so much that I somehow managed to break the mayonnaise, leaving the bowl an oily, powdery mess of macaroni and chopped onions. It was the color of sand at the Jersey Shore, so I chopped up some scallions and threw them in for a bit of green contrast. You couldn’t believe how many garlics and onions gave their lives for this thing.
Looking back on that bowl, the trained cook in me wants to recoil in horror. I’ve long since banished garlic powder from my pantry. I don’t ever add something just for color anymore. And I can’t understand how I managed to break Hellmann’s mayonnaise. But you know what? It was great. Sure, it made everyone breathe fire, and it wasn’t until Labor Day that we finally got the taste out of our mouths, but people scooped it up. Macaroni salad is supposed to be an inexpert food. It’s democratic. You boil macaroni, you toss it with mayonnaise. Everything else is secondary. It’s about the fact that anyone can make it, and anyone can enjoy it off a picnic table under a July sun.
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