Chow Down Chicago: Good Eats from the Windy City

  Instant macaroni and cheese was introduced by Kraft in Chicago during the Great Depression, but anyone who has tried homemade mac n' cheese knows that it is far superior. Let's take a look at the history of this much-loved dish.   Cheese and pasta were being paired together since as early as 160 BCE in Rome, although the earliest known versions of pasta and cheese were more like a lasagna than the dish we know and love today. Recipes for layered pasta and cheese were found in Italian cookbooks from the 1200s. During this time, macaroni was a generic word for pasta, and macaroni and cheese dishes strangely enough included sugar and cinnamon. However, sugar and cinnamon were used as commonly back then as salt and pepper are used today. By the mid-1700s, a creamier version of the dish without sugar and cinnamon was being made in France. Because the best English chefs were French, recipes for macaroni and cheese began circulating in cookbooks in England and the American colonies.

Taffy grapes are a relatively new but no less delicious phenomenon on the Chicago food scene. Taffy grapes are green seedless grapes dipped in white chocolate or almond bark and sprinkled with chopped nuts. They taste exactly like taffy apples, which is why they're called taffy grapes.   According to the Chicago Tribune , taffy grapes have been around since about 2011. The exact origins of the dessert aren’t clear, but they started popping up at stores and restaurants on the South Side, eventually spreading out to the West Side and south suburbs. Even barbershops and nail salons started selling containers of this sweet treat. Taffy grapes can be found at establishments like Harold’s Chicken, Baba’s Famous Steak and Lemonade, Sharks Fish & Chicken, and Nadia’s Gourmet Grapes, which offers over 30 different varieties of topped grapes, including red velvet and cookies and cream. Here’s a recipe for classic taffy grapes that originally appeared in The Takeout . I used white almond