I just saw Chef Gordon Ramsay making Mac and Cheese in a New Orleans restaurant.
Looked to me like the “macaroni” was spaghetti or linguine, not the stuff you’d get from Kraft or Annie’s. Is this common down South?
Not in my experience.
It seems to be a Nawlins thing, rather than a Southern thing:
Unless you grew up in New Orleans, you might have already noticed a distinct difference between this mac and cheese and the kind you’re used to. Instead of elbow noodles or shells, I use spaghetti noodles for my mac and cheese. And it’s not just me; this is how we do it in New Orleans!
I never knew it was strictly local to this area (New Orleans metro). I thought it was a known variation.
Around here, on a holiday table, baked “macaroni” made with spaghetti noodles is common enough, though not necessarily the default. I think doing it traditionally with elbow macaroni is at least as common.
When I was a kid plain macaroni and cheese was made using the boxed Kraft stuff. Homemade was “macoroni pie”, which includes eggs and is more cake-like in texture. Those were made with elbow macaroni or shell pasta, and is food of the gods.
First time ever hearing of it.
Sounds good! I’ll have to give it a try. 
Strange they would call it “MAC” & cheese since mac refers to macaroni which is a specific type of noodle.
What’s the story on how this tradition started? The story I grew up with is that Mac and cheese came to the US from France, when it was brought over in the 18th century by Thomas Jefferson. Spaghetti, as far as I understand, came over with Italian immigrants in the late 19th / early 20th century, and AFAIK New Orleans wasn’t a major destination for those immigrants. So how did this end up being a NoLa tradition?
Macaroni is just one type of pasta. Same ingredients and cooked the same way, but produced in tubes instead of long strings.
Come to Providence and ask people what macaroni is. I’ll give you a hint, a significant portion of them will tell you it’s spaghetti or any other form of pasta.
New Orleans was a major port of entry for Italian immigrants in the late 19th century. The first recorded use of the word “Mafia” in the US was in a New Orleans newspaper around 1890.
(IIRC, this was noted in Nick Tosches’ biography of Dean Martin, but I’d need to check to make sure.)
Right … so would it make sense to call a traditional “macaroni and cheese” dish, made with elbow macaroni, “spaghetti and cheese,” just because both macaroni and spaghetti are pasta? Not really. But I suppose “mac and cheese” has come to be associated with a particular set of ingredients/flavors/cooking method, and people think that substituting spaghetti is close enough that they’ll keep the name.
Personally, I think that changing the type of pasta used is a big deal, as it changes the texture of a dish (depending on what you’re making, it can also matter for sauce clinginess, though I imagine it doesn’t matter with a baked pasta-roux-cheese dish).
If you’ve watched The Sopranos, you’ve heard them call spaghetti “macaroni” and spaghetti sauce “gravy,” both of which are apparently East Coast things (since the show is set in New Jersey).
They also butter their cooked spaghetti, something I’d never heard of before.
Here is what the US Government says macaroni is:
Spaghetti are macaroni.
that’s pretty wild. Does the inverse work too? I mean, if you ask someone what “spaghetti” is, do they think it is any form of pasta also?
that’s not how I’m reading it. The genus is “macaroni product”, while the differentiated species are “macaroni”, “spaghetti” and “vermicelli”.
Hmm, I didn’t know buttered spaghetti was a thing, but I will say that as an impoverished college student looking for a cheap and filling snack, I would cook some pasta (any shape) well past al dente and add butter and salt. Yum!
Would you want to try “spag and cheese”?
Spaghetti boiled and then sauteed in olive oil and garlic is a common “peasant” dish in Italy. I believe they season it with freshly cracked pepper too.
(I knew this before I saw Furio making it on The Sopranos.)