On a hot summer day, a young boy in Northern California pauses in the middle of his manic, unstructured day and decides it’s time for some food. Mom and dad are at work, so he’ll have to make do with whatever his limited culinary skills can throw together from the pantry and fridge. Cereal is nice, but wears on you after a while. Melting some cheese on a flour tortilla works nicely, and is a frequent go-to solution for mid-day snacks. The boy cracks open the refrigerator to grab the cheese, but lo! What’s the salad bowl doing in there? Put away the cheese, child: there’s macaroni salad to be had!

The way my family puts it together is pretty simple:

• 1lb of ditalini pasta (aka “salad macaroni”)
• 7 or 8 eggs
• Mayonnaise
• Celery
• Red onion
• Tobasco sauce
• Salt
• Black Pepper
• White Vinegar

Dump the pasta into boiling water for about ten minutes and boil up the eggs. While they’re cooking, dice half the red onion and four or five stalks of celery. The quantities are vague because sometimes you’ll want your salad a little crunchier than others. Just make sure the resulting pieces are smaller than the macaroni.

Drain the pasta and dump it into a salad bowl. Shell the eggs and dice them. Add the eggs, celery, and onions to the pasta. Drop in four or five spoons full of mayonnaise. Set aside the spoon you used for the mayo. Splash some Tobasco onto the mayo, add a large pinch of salt and a couple grinds of fresh black pepper, and stir with a separate spoon or salad tongs. You may want to go back for more mayo if things are looking a bit dry, and you don’t want to pollute your mayo jar, do you? Leave the vinegar in your cupboard; it’s listed above because its most important role here is its absence. Refrigerate overnight and serve cold.

The recipe calls for mayonnaise, not tangy white salad dressing. I prefer Best Foods, which I understand is sold as “Hellman’s” in some regions. Salt, pepper, and pepper sauce are present for flavor, and should be added to taste. Note that the pepper sauce should just be adding a little depth here. This isn’t supposed to be a spicy salad. The celery is present for color and texture. You can make the salad a lot crunchier without changing the flavor much by just chopping up another stalk and stirring it in. The onion is present for color, texture, and flavor.