James' World 2

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You’re making up a macaroni and cheese casserole for the neighborhood potluck. As you stir, the plump elbows surrender to the thick, creamy orange cheese sauce. The voluptuous, squishy sound of walking barefoot through mud promises success. A top layer of grated cheese, browned to a golden crust, will add the final irresistible allure to this quintessentially American dish. But how did a combination of cheese and pasta—two European cultural exports—become one of America’s best-known staples?

The most famous version of the story goes like this: Thomas Jefferson brought an enslaved James Hemings to France to study culinary arts. Jefferson not only financed the lavish crash course in gastronomy but smuggled a pasta machine back from Naples so that Hemings could introduce macaroni and cheese to the elite families of the American South. Often, Hemings is left out of the story completely and Jefferson alone is the protagonist. A Budweiser ad from 1948 shows an illustration of Jefferson himself, serving plates of freshly made pasta to fellow forefathers. But that tidy origin story is just an example of a gastromyth—a food-related tall tale that snowballed as it’s been told to new generations. When it comes to macaroni and cheese history, we’ve got a lot more unpacking to do.

Roman party food origins

The earliest mention that we have of pasta and cheese being joined together dates back as far as 160 BCE, when Marcus Porcius Cato, ultraconservative senator of the then Roman Republic, wrote his treatise on running a vast country estate, De Agri Cultura. In it, he included a few recipes for ritual gatherings and holidays that bring together what could be construed as pasta and fresh cheese. “Placenta” (pronounced with a hard c) is one of those. It was made with layers of cheese packed between stacked sheets of whole-grain dough. Festive recipes like these became inextricably linked with the taste of pasta and cheese and thus became embedded in the collective memory as a marker of culinary identity.

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Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Kaitlin Wayne

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He dressed like an ancient monk but ushered in a new era in Japanese art.

Working at the turn of the 20th century, the artist Tomioka Tessai picked up on Chinese traditions newly available to Japanese travelers and scholars and added a dash of his own personality to turn out art that, to some observers, shared similarities with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of the day.

“He gave himself this guise of recluse—growing out his beard, living in a messy house with I don’t know how many cats and all that,” says Frank Feltens, the Smithsonian’s curator of Japanese art. At the same time, he was a savvy operator who kept friendly relationships with the emperor and had connections with the management of a department store conglomerate that sold a lot of his work. So the artist, who died on New Year’s Eve 1924 at the age of 87, was “living in the real, modern present but at the same time using the past as a touchstone,” says Feltens, adding that because Tessai combined these aspects so seamlessly he would become one of Japan’s most important thought leaders of the time.

“Meeting Tessai: Modern Japanese Art from the Cowles Collection,” a succinct exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, is putting a new spotlight on the artist’s largely forgotten work, along with that of his most important mentor, the Buddhist poet, and nun Otagaki Rengetsu. The exhibition represents the first major Tessai survey in half a century, and the display is culled from the Mary and Cheney Cowles collection that was donated to the museum in 2019. Over the course of the past five years, the Seattle couple turned over 260 works to the museum’s Freer Gallery of Art following their 20 years of collecting.

“For the Japan collections at the Freer Gallery, it’s the biggest and most significant addition to the collection, actually, since the founding of the museum in 1923,” says Feltens, who organized the show.

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Tomioka Tessai was beloved for the personality and humor he infused in his work, with exaggerated expressions on his figures, and traditional scenes such as that of his 1921 Blind Men Appraising an Elephant (above: detail, 1921).  Freer Gallery of Art, The Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection

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Roughly every four years, an extra day gets tacked onto the end of February, a time-keeping convention known as the leap year. The practice of adjusting the calendar with an extra day was established by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago and modified in the 16th century by Pope Gregory XIII, bequeathing us the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

That extra day is a way of aligning the calendar year of 365 days with how long it actually takes Earth to make a trip around the sun, which is nearly one-quarter of a day longer. The added day ensures that the seasons stay put rather than shifting around the year as the mismatch lengthens.

Humanity struggles to impose order on the small end of the time scale, too. Lately the second is running into trouble. Traditionally the unit was defined in astronomical terms, as one-86,400th of the mean solar day (the time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis). In 1967 the world’s metrologists instead began measuring time from the ground up, with atomic clocks. The official length of the basic unit, the second, was fixed at 9,192,631,770 vibrations of an atom of cesium 133. Eighty-six thousand four hundred such seconds compose one day. (see article)

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The Astronomer,” a 1668 painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer.Credit…DeAgostini/Getty Images

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