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VEGETABLES, MACEDOINE OF (for garnishing dishes)
Take equal quantities of carrots, turnips, green peas, asparagus peas, French beans, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflowers. With a vegetable scoop cu the carrots and turnips into pieces a quarter of an inch square, or turn them into the shapes of olives, filberts, etc. Divide the cauliflowers and French beans into small neat pieces. Cook the vegetables separately in plenty of water slightly salted; when done enough drain and dry them. When the macedoine is wanted, put into a saucepan as much good white sauce as will moisten the vegetables, toss them lightly in it, being careful not to break them. When they are quite hot, the macedoine will be ready for serving. When the sauce is made entirely without stock, this garnish becomes Vegetable Macedoine Maigre.
A garnish rather than a dish in itself: seven vegetables cut to a uniform size, cooked apart, then bound at the last minute in a little white sauce. The whole point is that nothing is overcooked and nothing bleeds colour into anything else.
- Cook separately, and mean itEach vegetable goes into its own pan of salted water and comes out at its own moment — peas in roughly three or four minutes, carrot and turnip balls in six to eight, cauliflower florets in three or four. Cooking them together is the surest way to spoil a macedoine.
- Refresh and drainThe book says drain and dry; drop each batch into ice water first, then drain on a cloth. This fixes the green colour and stops residual heat softening the pieces while the rest of the vegetables cook.
- The vegetable scoopA parisienne cutter or the small end of a melon baller. "Turning" means paring a piece into a smooth seven-sided barrel with a small knife — olive-size for these, filbert-size being about the dimension of a hazelnut.
- Asparagus peasThe name is unstable. It may mean the asparagus pea grown in Victorian gardens, or asparagus tips cut into pea-sized rounds to match the green peas in the mixture; the recipe does not say which.
- French beansOrdinary green beans. Top and tail them and cut into quarter-inch lengths, or on the diagonal, to keep the scale consistent with the diced root vegetables.
- Good white sauceA béchamel or a velouté made with veal or chicken stock, loose enough to coat rather than cling. Use only enough to gloss the vegetables — a tablespoon or two per portion. Toss over gentle heat; the sauce is there to warm and bind, not to cook anything further.
- MaigreFrom the French for lean: a sauce built on milk or water with no meat stock, for fast days and meatless meals. The vegetables and the method are otherwise unchanged.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given because the garnish is scaled to whatever it accompanies. Something like a quarter cup of finished macedoine per plate; a few ounces of each vegetable, trimmed, will dress a table of eight.
- Working aheadThe blanched and dried vegetables keep covered in the refrigerator for a day. Sauce them only at the moment of service — held hot in sauce they slump and the cauliflower breaks up.
Macédoine entered French cookery vocabulary in the eighteenth century, and the name is generally traced to Macedonia and the empire of Alexander — a mixture of many distinct parts held together, the joke being that the pieces stay recognisably themselves. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled, the term covered both this savoury version and a sweet one of diced fruit in syrup or jelly. The macedoine was taught as an exercise in knife work and timing, the sort of thing a cook produced to dress the border of a mould of chicken or a cold salmon in a household where the appearance of a dish carried as much weight as its flavour. The maigre variant at the end is a reminder of how routinely Victorian kitchens still had to cook around meatless days.