While distantly linked to the Italian pasta dish, this 17th-18th century adjective means dandified, fancy, or over-the-top, in reference to the flamboyant macaroni hairpiece commonly worn by wealthy young men returning from their Grand Tour of Europe.
Here’s description of such a fellow, Captain Whiffle, in Tobias Smollett's comedic novel Roderick Random (1748):
“Overshadowed with a vast umbrella ... dressed in this manner; a white hat garnished with a red feather adorned his head from whence his hair flowed upon his shoulders in ringlets tied behind with ribbon. His coat, consisting of a pink-coloured silk lined with white, by the elegance of the cut retired backwards, as it were, to discover a white satin waistcoat embroidered with gold, unbuttoned at the upper part to display a brooch set with garnets that glittered in the breast of his shirt, which was of the finest cambric edged with right Mechlin.”
The word first appears in English in a 1616 play by Ben Jonson - Cynthia’s Revels or
The Fountain of Self-Love (A Comical Satyr), although an earlier reference is also to the Italian gnocchi rather than macaroni pasta. But there is a crossover between the two, macaroni described in a 1673 travel guide as a “paste made into strings like pack-thread or thongs of whit-leather which if greater they [the Italians] call Macaroni, if lesser Vermicelli,” that food becoming popular with wealthier, more foppish tastes in London and elsewhere, with The Macaroni Club generally referring to those returning from their Grand Tour who sported over-the-top wigs of the rococo style, dressed and spoke in an outlandishly affected and effeminate manner. The term was often used pejoratively. A self-made dandy was a British middle-class man who impersonated an aristocratic lifestyle. They notably wore silk strip cloth, stuck feathers in their hats, and rather absurdly carried two pocket watches with chains – ”one to tell what time it was and the other to tell what time it was not”.
‘A macaroni dressing room’, coloured etching by I.W., 26 June 1772
The term even stretched across the Atlantic Ocean to America. The popular nursery rhyme and patriot, as well as ironic song Yankee Doodle, sung in the United States and state anthem of Connecticut was already popular by back in the 1750s, derived from a traditional song and nursery rhyme, the early versions of which predate the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary conflict. Prior to this tune was also well known across western Europe, with the melody possibly originating from an Irish tune All the way to Galway, with the earliest words deriving from a Middle Dutch harvest song.
In the 1770s British troops sang the song to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap. But then it became popular among the Americans as a song of defiance with added verses that mocked the British and hailed George Washington as leader. By 1781, Yankee Doodle had turned from being an insult to being a song of national pride. Sohere are many variants, but the most modern and best known version includes the opening lines:
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.
Yankee Doodle keep it up,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.
In the natural world, there are many bird species with showy colourful feathers, not least the peacock, but using the actual word, here’s a macaroni penguin with ornate orange and yellow head crest:
Macaroni penguin (Eudyptes chrysolophus)
Feel free to share anything more in relation to anything macaronyish or the Macaroni Club, whether in music or wider culture, such as from film, art, or other contexts, in comments below.
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