1)Put the macaroni on to cook. You want about 75g per person. Use a very large pan of water, brought to the boil before you salt it, and salt it generously like all good Italian pasta is. Make sure you stir the macaroni regularly whilst you cook it for 8-10 minutes, until al dente, although of course when baked in a cheese sauce they won't keep that texture. Before you drain it, remove about half a cup of starchy water for later.
2)Fry about 50g pancetta cubes or just chopped bacon with 3 chopped spring onions until cooked. Leave to cool.
3)Begin the white sauce. It's a tedious but essential job to cook a great white sauce, and this is how I do it. Set a pan of about 1 1/2 pints of full fat milk, though you may need more later to heat so the sauce cooks faster later. To furtger infuse the taste, add a wedge of parmesan left over and stashed in the freezer once disembowelled of all its contents and some grated nutmeg or a blade of mace. Meanwhile, in a different pan, plonk about 75g or so (you don't need to be accurate here, just add different amounts until it has the right consistency) of butter in a pan. Add some flour a tbsp at a time, plus a teaspoon of English mustard powder to bring out the cheese, and mix it in, scraping around the corners until you have a fairly thin ointment, about American pancake battery thickness if that makes you any the wiser. Cook this mixture whilst keeping it moving, for a few minutes, before gradually adding the hot milk off the heat. It's very boring, but you have to add only a bit of milk at a time, stirring it in well each time. Once the consistency is much less thickened, about the consistency of a thin cake batter, you can add the rest of the milk and whisk it in. About 1 1/2 pints of milk should do it, but all you really need to look out for is that at this stage, it should be the consistency only a tiny bit thicker than the milk itself. Grate in plenty more nutmeg, and a good pinch of white pepper. Of course you can use black, but white pepper is better for sauces. Bring this to the boil very slowly so you cook off the flour and it goes smooth, and somehow more tender, stirring the whole time, and just before it boils the sauce will suddenly thicken. That's the annoying last-minuteness of sauces. With the heated milk I find this takes about 2-3 minutes.
4)To make a cheese sauce to cover veg or serve with fish, you would just use a handful or so of good strong cheddar so it's not as thick as this, but here, the key is using a variety of different cheeses in large quantities. I know it's not thrifty, but I usually use about 4 types: cheddar, mozzarella, brie and parmesan, being the essential here. I love a good blue cheese like dolcelatte, and I often use it here but it does give the sauce and ugly grey/green colour. Grate them all well, and if you're using a soft one like brie and mozzarella just chop them up, leaving the rind on the brie. There should he about 500g maybe of cheese altogether. Take the sauce off the heat, and mix in the cheeses until they melt. If you would like some extra bite, add some hot sauce and add some pickled jalapenos to the pancetta. And if you're going for peppy Mexico mac and cheese, consider including grated spicy Mexican cheese.
5)Mix everything together, plus the pasta cooking water you reserved earlier and place in a baking dish. Then give it a gratin with some breadcrumbs, or when I was younger I often used crushed bags of savoury crisps, and grated cheese. If you were wondering why my breadcrumbs are so orange, that's because of an abandoned recipe of Cheetos Schnitzel and I keep the leftover unnaturally orange in the freezer. Bake for about 30 minutes and serve with a light fresh salad.
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