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Macedoines in Cases, with Asparagus and Macaroni
Take about a pound and a half of fresh cooked vegetables, such as green peas, French beans, young carrots, etc., six to eight ounces of macaroni, and some asparagus and white sauce. Take some pastry made of potato pulp, flour, butter, salt, pepper, and a raw egg. Line some deep patty-pans and bake carefully. The fresh vegetables (but not the asparagus) are to be heated and put in the cases after a little sauce has been put in. The asparagus should be boiled and arranged in the centre of the macaroni, which should first be merely cooked and coated with sauce. This dish may be varied by using rice or other grain instead of macaroni, and sea-kale in place of asparagus. Probable cost, about 2s.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a set of measured instructions: Cassell's assumes you already know how to make a white sauce and a short crust, and leaves the proportions of the potato pastry entirely to you. The points below fill in what a modern cook needs.
- The hinge: assemble at the last minuteEverything here is cooked separately and brought together only to serve. Cases, vegetables, macaroni and sauce should all be hot when they meet; a filled case left standing goes soft at the base within minutes.
- Deep patty-pansThese are individual tartlet or muffin tins, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 inches across. The book gives no temperature or time; 'bake carefully' probably implies baking the empty cases until set and coloured so they will hold a wet filling. In a modern oven, blind baking with weights at about 400F for 15-20 minutes will do this.
- Potato pastry proportionsNo quantities are given. A workable ratio is equal weights of cold dry mashed potato and flour, with butter at about a quarter of the flour weight, one egg, and seasoning; the dough should be rolled thicker than ordinary short crust because it is more fragile.
- MacaroniVictorian macaroni generally came as long tubes, and Victorian recipes commonly call for boiling it far longer than we would today. Modern dried pasta wants to be cooked just short of tender, drained and turned in the sauce off the heat, or it will collapse under the asparagus.
- White sauceA plain béchamel: equal butter and flour cooked together, milk whisked in, simmered 10 minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Keep it slack enough to coat rather than to set, since it stiffens as it cools in the cases.
- AsparagusBoil it separately in salted water and stop it while the stems still have bite, 3-5 minutes for medium spears. It is arranged upright or in a small bundle at the centre, so trim the spears to a length that suits your tins.
- Sea-kale, the suggested substituteSea-kale is a blanched winter vegetable, now sold rarely and mostly by specialist growers. Blanched chicory or the pale heart of a young leek gives a similar effect if you cannot find it.
- Yield and costA pound and a half of vegetables plus the macaroni will fill a good number of patty-cases, enough for a first course for several people, though the book gives no yield. The 'probable cost, about 2s.' is two shillings, a figure Cassell's gives throughout to help a household budget.
Macédoine is a French kitchen term for a mixture of small, evenly cut vegetables or fruits, and the name is traditionally traced to Macedonia and the many peoples gathered under Alexander's empire — an etymology repeated in cookery books for two centuries but not documented in any early source. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century the macédoine was a fixture of English service: peas, beans and diced carrot bound in white sauce, used as a garnish, a salad, or as here the filling for pastry cases.