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Macedoine of Vegetables
Boil two dozen asparagus tops, twelve button onions, half a cauliflower, two turnips, and two carrots, twelve new potatoes cut small, and twenty pods of French beans sliced. Put them all into a stewpan with a pint of bechamel and a little salt and pepper. Make very hot, and serve.
A straightforward warm vegetable dish; the only real difficulty is that everything is boiled separately and must arrive at the sauce cooked but intact.
- Cook each vegetable apartThe list is one sentence but the timings are not: asparagus tips need 2-3 minutes, French beans 3-4, cauliflower florets 4-5, diced turnip and carrot 6-8, button onions and small new potatoes 12-15. Boil in separate batches in well-salted water and drain; a single pot gives mush and raw carrot at once.
- Cut to one sizeThe name macedoine generally implies small pieces of roughly matching size, though this version leaves the button onions whole and only directs that the potatoes be 'cut small' and the beans sliced. Breaking the cauliflower into pieces of about the same scale as the diced turnip and carrot keeps the dish looking of a piece.
- BechamelA pint here is the Imperial pint, 20 fl oz. Bechamel in this period is a white sauce built on a roux, often infused with aromatics and sometimes enriched with cream; a plain white sauce will stand in. Make it loose, since drained vegetables tighten it.
- "Make very hot"This means bring the sauced vegetables just to serving temperature over low heat, stirring gently with a spoon rather than a whisk. Simmering them in the sauce breaks the cauliflower and greys the beans.
- Refresh if working aheadPlunge each boiled batch into cold water and drain well, then reheat all together in the sauce. Useful if the batches cannot be timed to finish together, though the recipe as written assumes they are sauced straight from the pot.
- French beans and turnips"French beans" are green beans, stringed if the variety needs it. Use young white turnips, not large storage ones, which turn bitter and watery in a delicate sauce.
- YieldOn these quantities, roughly six to eight as a side dish. Dishes of this kind were commonly served alongside plain roast or boiled meat.
Macedoine entered French kitchen language in the eighteenth century and is generally explained as a joke on Macedonia, the empire of Alexander made up of many peoples mixed together and held under one rule -- hence any mixture of small, evenly cut pieces bound by a common dressing. In nineteenth-century English cookery the word covers both the savoury version, dressed in bechamel or butter or set in aspic, and a sweet one of diced fruit in syrup, which is where the modern fruit salad sense comes from. The ingredient list points to early summer, when asparagus, new potatoes, button onions and young French beans overlap.