For those nostalgic enough to look into them, old restaurant menus can reveal distant worlds. A Stouffer’s restaurant menu dated Friday, July 5, 1955, for instance, lists a macaroni and cheese dinner plate for a dollar, among other entrées like chicken fricassee, broiled whitefish and breaded pork steak with apple sauce. The mac and cheese came with a trio of sides: spinach soufflé, julienne carrots and a tossed green salad. If a drink was in order, one could wash all of that down with a claret cobbler, a cocktail of red wine, fresh fruit and sugar; or maybe with a Bamboo, which mixes sherry and vermouth — both for 55 cents.

This is the same Stouffer’s that has become best known for frozen dinners sold in a distinctive red box. The company began as a family business in the early 1900s, operating a small dairy stand in Cleveland before expanding into restaurants, hotels and freezer-aisle products. Vernon Bigelow Stouffer inherited the business and turned it into an American food empire.

Some may consider Stouffer’s a metonym for TV dinner. But from the French-bread pizza to the lasagna with meat sauce, Stouffer’s products are relics that remain household staples decades later. The mac and cheese in particular has become what I consider the platonic ideal of that dish: a sauce of creamy, golden velvet on bouncy, perfectly cooked (arguably overcooked) noodles, the cheese still voluptuously smooth even after a long stint in the oven.

When Michelle Johnson (who goes by Micky), 42, was growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, her grandparents would heat up individual 12-ounce trays of Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese whenever she and her sister stayed over. It was “always baked in the oven until brown and bubbly on top, the edges blackened,” she recalled. “The crispy burnt bits were the best parts.”

For Johnson, the pasta alone was the meal.

“We ate it right out of the plastic containers, no scooping it out onto plates or anything fancy like that,” she says. “Just the mac and cheese, maybe with Tab or 7Up to wash it down.”

There are many ways to arrive at a Stouffer’s-style macaroni and cheese in your own kitchen without having to stroll by the freezer aisle.

This recipe starts with a classic roux (a mixture of butter and flour), which becomes a béchamel when milk joins the party. The transition from béchamel to cheese sauce is a beautiful thing: It will seem as if it’s a lot of cheese at first, but that’s because it’s a lot of sauce. The sauce-to-pasta ratio here is really what makes Stouffer’s mac and cheese, well, Stouffer’s mac and cheese.

Re-creating that creaminess was the biggest challenge. Overheating a cheese sauce can cause its emulsion to break, turning a velvety pasta into a grainy gunge. If it’s baked macaroni and cheese you’re after, then there’s little getting around this.

But there is one method that works. Paul Adams, the senior science research editor at Cook’s Illustrated, has written about the stabilizing powers of sodium citrate, an ingredient found in processed cheeses like Velveeta.

“It’s fun to see it in action,” he says, “because it opens up a whole world of otherwise ineligible cheeses that you can melt smoothly into a sauce.”

Though you could go out and buy sodium citrate, using a smidgen of Velveeta in your sauce does wonders for keeping it indelibly smooth and bound, like movie-theater nacho cheese.

Creamy Baked Macaroni and Cheese

Ingredients:

• Salt

• 1 pound cavatappi or elbow macaroni

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

• 6 cups whole milk

• 1 pound sharp or extra-sharp yellow cheddar, coarsely grated (5 1/4 cups)

• 8 ounces Velveeta, torn into pieces

• 4 ounces Pecorino Romano, coarsely grated (1 cup)

• 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard powder

• 1/4 teaspoon onion powder

• Pinch of ground cayenne

• Freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and season generously with salt. Add the pasta and cook according to package instructions, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, until just past al dente. Drain and set aside.

Return the empty pot to the stove (no need to clean it) and set over medium heat. Melt the butter and simmer, whisking occasionally, until the butter stops spurting and quiets down, 2-3 minutes. Add the flour and cook, whisking, until smooth like gravy, about 1 minute.

Whisk in the milk. Raise the heat to high and bring to a simmer, whisking constantly, then immediately reduce the heat to low and continue simmering until the sauce lightly coats the back of a spoon, 2-5 minutes. At this stage, the sauce should be smooth but relatively loose. Take the pot off the heat.

To the pot, add the cheddar, Velveeta, Pecorino Romano, mustard powder, onion powder and cayenne, and season generously with salt and black pepper. Whisk until the cheese is melted and smooth like nacho cheese. Add the drained pasta, breaking up any clumps, and stir until evenly coated in the cheese sauce. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.

Transfer to a 9-by-13-inch baking pan or dish and bake until bubbling at the edges, 15-20 minutes. Serve immediately.

Total time: 1 hour.

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