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Fruit Jelly Macedoine
Use wine, orange, or lemon jelly. Pour jelly in mold to depth of one half inch. Decorate bottom of mold with a slice of banana, and radiating from it halves of blanched almonds. Cover with jelly, and arrange in alternating layers, English walnuts, candied fruits, figs and jelly. Chill; serve and garnish with whipped cream.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a formula: it assumes you already have a pan of wine, orange, or lemon gelatin from elsewhere in the book. Everything depends on patience with the layers.
- The hinge: set each layer before adding the nextChill the half-inch base until it is firm to the touch, then add fruit and pour on jelly that has cooled to the consistency of raw egg white. Jelly poured on warm will melt the layer beneath and float the decoration out of position.
- What "jelly" means hereA sweetened gelatin dessert, not preserves. As a starting point, about 1 tablespoon (one envelope, roughly 7 g) powdered gelatin per 2 cups liquid; for a jelly firm enough to unmold cleanly you may want a little less liquid. Period recipes using sheet gelatin or isinglass varied in strength, so the set is less predictable.
- Working temperatureKeep the reserve jelly in a bowl over warm water so it stays fluid while the mold chills, and cool each portion to syrupy before pouring. Gentle reheating of set gelatin is usually tolerated, but avoid boiling or repeated hard heating, which can weaken the set.
- Fruits that will not setFresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya and figs contain proteases (mango is sometimes listed but is much weaker) that break down gelatin and prevent it setting. Cooking or candying deactivates them, so the recipe's figs should be dried or candied rather than fresh; if you substitute, use canned or cooked fruit.
- Blanched almondsPour boiling water over shelled almonds, stand two minutes, drain, and slip off the skins. Split them along the natural seam while still damp for clean halves to radiate around the banana.
- Banana browningCut the slice at the last moment and dip it in lemon juice or in the jelly itself. Enclosed in gelatin it keeps its color reasonably well, but exposed cut banana greys within the hour.
- Mold and unmoldingThe recipe specifies no quantities, but a 1-quart charlotte or fluted mold is a reasonable choice. Dip it to the rim in warm (not hot) water for five to ten seconds, loosen the edge with a fingertip, and invert onto a chilled platter.
- Time and yieldAllow 20 to 30 minutes of chilling per layer and at least four hours total, or overnight. A quart mold would serve roughly six to eight, though the recipe states no yield.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of different fruits or vegetables cut small, the name generally traced to the ethnic patchwork of Macedonia under Alexander; the figurative culinary sense is variously dated to the mid-eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Set in gelatin, it became a standard American company dessert once commercial powdered gelatin made jelly a matter of a packet rather than a day of boiling calves' feet, and molded fruit jellies were a common feature of dessert chapters around 1900. Its appearance in a cookbook issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, is a reminder of what these books were: general household manuals published to sell one product, filled out with the full range of contemporary cookery so a cook would keep the volume on the shelf.