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Macedoine Salad
One cup each of string beans, green peas, carrots and celery. Sprinkle with salt and cayenne, and marinate with French dressing. Chill one hour. Arrange in mounds on salad dish, and separate mounds with cold cooked cauliflower, which has been separated and marinated. Any combination of cold cooked vegetables may be prepared in the same way.
A composed vegetable salad that depends entirely on the vegetables being properly cooked, properly drained and properly dressed while still warm enough to absorb the vinaigrette.
- The hinge: dress while barely warmDressing while still warm -- Warm vegetables tend to take up French dressing more readily than chilled ones, so it is worth tossing each as soon as it is drained and then refrigerating. The recipe itself is written for cold cooked vegetables and simply directs that they be marinated and chilled an hour.
- Cut sizesMacédoine refers to a mixture of vegetables cut small. The recipe gives no dimensions; cutting carrots and celery to a small dice and the beans into short lengths, roughly to the scale of the peas, keeps the four reading as one texture.
- Cooking the vegetablesBoil each separately in salted water until just tender, timing to the vegetable, and drain thoroughly; peas need only a few minutes, beans and diced carrots slightly longer. The recipe assumes all the vegetables are cooked, though celery is often left raw for crunch.
- French dressing, 1907 senseFrench dressing, period sense -- Not a sweet bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar, commonly somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken.
- CayenneA very small pinch. The intent is a warm edge behind the vinegar, not visible heat.
- The cauliflower dividersBreak the cooked head into florets of even size and marinate them separately, as the recipe directs; overcooked cauliflower collapses and will not hold its place between the mounds.
- ChillingThe recipe calls for one hour; longer chilling does no harm, though it is worth draining off pooled dressing before arranging or the platter looks oily.
- YieldFour cups of dressed vegetables plus cauliflower serves six as a side salad, or four as a lunch course on lettuce.
Macédoine is French kitchen vocabulary for a mixture of small-diced vegetables or fruit, the name generally traced to Macedonia as a byword for a patchwork of different peoples under one rule — a joke about variety that is said to have entered French culinary usage at some point before the nineteenth century. By the time this book appeared, macedoine salads had a place in American cookery, and they could be built entirely in advance and arranged decoratively on a platter. Lowney's, a chocolate company, published its cook book as promotional literature, and the general chapters like this one exist to make the volume a usable household book rather than a pamphlet of confectionery; the closing line inviting "any combination of cold cooked vegetables" is characteristic of the period's willingness to treat a recipe as a formula rather than a fixed list.