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Roots, Macedoine Of
Take some button onions, peel them; some carrots as red as you can get them, and some nice young turnips. Pare off the outer red part of the carrots, having first scraped and cleaned them thoroughly, and cut the parings into bits about the size of peas; do so also with the turnips, but leave the onions whole. Fry the onions and turnips in a good lump of butter and a tea-spoonful of sugar, but the carrots require more cooking, and should be stewed previously in water for about ten or fifteen minutes, when they may be fried with the rest. Toss all the vegetables well in the butter until they are glazed but not burned. Add a cupful of BECHAMEL MAIGRE and stew, with a proper seasoning of salt and pepper, until the mace-doine has acquired a rather thickish consistency and the sauce is reduced. To thicken, add the yolk of an egg beaten up with two table-spoonfuls of cream. Stir in the thickening when the macedoine is ready to serve, and when the heat has gone off a little, or the milk will curdle and spoil the sauce. If not required for a maigre dish, use bechamel made with meat, but in every other respect proceed as before directed. Time, fifteen minutes to stew the carrots; to fry, five or six minutes. Probable cost of bechamel maigre, per pint, 6d. This is mostly used as a maigre dish.
A glazed vegetable dice bound with white sauce, written for a cook who already has bechamel to hand. Two details carry the dish: the carrot is used for its outer layer only, and the egg-and-cream liaison must never be allowed to boil.
- The liaison is the hingeBeat the yolk with the cream, take the pan off the heat and let it stop bubbling before stirring the mixture in. Above roughly 180F the yolk sets in threads and the sauce breaks, exactly as the original warns.
- Bechamel maigreA meatless white sauce: butter and flour cooked together, then milk, with no meat or poultry stock. Maigre means lean, i.e. suitable for a fast day. The alternative given at the end is simply bechamel "made with meat."
- Only the outer carrotThe recipe cuts the dice from the "parings" — the deeply coloured outer layer, leaving the pale core unused. Expect to start with a good deal more carrot than you will end up with in dice, or simply dice young carrots whole and accept a less uniform colour.
- Size of the dice"About the size of peas" is the standard macedoine cut, near enough to 1/4 inch. Keep carrot and turnip the same size or the timings will not line up.
- Button onionsPickling or pearl onions, left whole. Trim the root flat so they hold together and cook them gently; scorched sugar turns the whole dish bitter.
- The sugar is for glazingA teaspoonful with the butter is enough to give a shine, not sweetness. Keep the heat moderate and toss constantly — the instruction is "glazed but not burned."
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given. Roughly 1 lb of prepared vegetables in total with a cupful of sauce — the book sets no standard for a cupful, so read it as a breakfast cup, somewhere near half a pint — serves about four as a side dish; reduce until the sauce coats rather than pools.
- The costing"6d per pint" is pre-decimal British currency and reflects 19th-century prices. Ignore it as anything but a period detail.
A macedoine is a mixture of vegetables or fruit cut to uniform small dice, the name generally traced to Macedonia as a byword for a mixture of peoples — a piece of kitchen wordplay that was already conventional in French cookery books by the early 1800s. The recipe demonstrates two techniques at once: glazing in butter and sugar, and finishing a sauce with an egg-and-cream liaison. The note that it is mostly used as a maigre dish suggests something of how Victorian menu-planning could still turn on fast days and Lent, when a dish had to be built without meat stock; the same recipe served, with the meat bechamel, as an ordinary garnish for the rest of the year.