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Macedoine of Fruits in Syrup
Make a syrup by boiling ten ounces of lump sugar in a pint of water for a few minutes. Flavour with a table-spoonful of brandy and the same of any desired liqueur. The fruits must be chosen from those in season, using a good variety, such as ripe currants, raspberries, cherries, strawberries, slices of melons, and apricots, etc. Let the syrup be quite cold, and mix it with the fruit in equal measure--a pint and a half of syrup to a pint and a half of mixed fruits. Set on ice until required, and serve with custard or whipped cream.
A Victorian fruit salad in a light brandied syrup. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities and the chilling need a little translating.
- Lump sugarLoaf sugar broken into cubes — chemically the same as today's granulated white sugar. Ten ounces is roughly 1½ cups.
- The pint problemCassell's is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz (about 2½ US cups). More to the point, the syrup recipe yields something over a pint — the dissolved sugar adds volume of its own — but still less than the pint and a half the assembly calls for, so it is worth scaling the syrup up by half: 15 oz sugar to 1½ imperial pints of water.
- Boil briefly"A few minutes" means only long enough to dissolve the sugar and clear the syrup. Prolonged boiling concentrates it and it will be cloying against ripe fruit.
- Add the spirits off the heatThe brandy and liqueur go in after the syrup has stopped boiling, or the alcohol and much of the aroma leave with the steam. The recipe leaves the choice open; kirsch, maraschino and curaçao were among the liqueurs commonly used at the period, and any of them still works.
- Quite cold means quite coldWarm syrup poured over raspberries and strawberries collapses them within minutes. Chill the syrup thoroughly before it meets the fruit.
- Fruit preparationHull the berries, stone the cherries and apricots, seed the melon. The recipe asks for the melon in slices; if you prefer an even spoonful, cut everything to roughly the size of a cherry instead.
- Order of assemblyFirm fruit — melon, apricot, cherry — can steep an hour or two. Raspberries and currants are best folded in shortly before serving so they hold their shape.
- "Set on ice"An icebox instruction. Two to four hours in the refrigerator does the same work; longer and the berries begin to go soft and the syrup turns pink from bleeding fruit.
- YieldThree pints of finished macédoine, enough for eight to ten as a dessert with pouring custard or lightly whipped cream.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of many small pieces — most often diced vegetables, but here fruit — and the name is traditionally traced to Macedonia and the assortment of peoples gathered under Alexander's empire, an etymology repeated in nineteenth-century cookbooks more often than it is documented. Its appearance in Cassell's reflects how thoroughly French terminology had settled into the English middle-class table by the 1870s: a bowl of seasonal fruit in syrup is dressed up with a French name, a spoonful of brandy and a liqueur, and is set on ice — a genuine luxury when ice was bought by the block and kept in an insulated chest. The instruction that the fruits "must be chosen from those in season, using a good variety" leaves the cook to work with whatever the moment offers.