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Macedoine of Vegetable Salad (Dress one cup each of cooked)
Dress one cup, each, of cooked carrots and turnips, cut in dice, string beans, cut small, green peas, and half a cup of cooked beets, cut small, with French dressing; add two tablespoonfuls of chopped gherkins; drain, and mix with sufficient jelly mayonnaise to hold the vegetables together.
Arrange in dome shape and cover with more jelly mayonnaise. Set a row of sliced gherkins near the top, and fill in the space to the top with string beans or asparagus tips. Surround the base with alternate rounds of beet and potato overlapping one another. Decorate the space above with slices of potato and beet cut in diamonds, and surround the base with light-green aspic cut in diamonds. One pint of aspic will be sufficient; use chicken stock, and tint with color paste.
A composed, mirrored salad of the sort meant to be carried to the table whole and cut at the sideboard. The dressings do the structural work, so read the notes on jelly mayonnaise and aspic before you start cutting vegetables.
- The hinge: gelatin and timingJelly mayonnaise is ordinary mayonnaise into which dissolved gelatin has been stirred while still liquid but not hot, roughly a teaspoon of powdered gelatin softened in a tablespoon of cold water and melted, per cup of mayonnaise. It sets within minutes once cool, so have the vegetables dressed, drained and mounded before you make it, and coat the dome at once.
- Drain hardFrench dressing here is simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper; period books give proportions anywhere from two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is used as a marinade rather than a finishing sauce. Any of it left clinging will thin the jelly mayonnaise and slump the dome. Turn the vegetables out onto a towel and blot them.
- Bleeding beetsHalf a cup of cooked beet will stain the whole macedoine pink if mixed in wet and warm. Dress the beet separately, drain it, and fold it in last, or reserve it entirely for the sliced garnish.
- AspicOne pint of chicken stock set with gelatin. A jelly firm enough to cut into diamonds and stand up wants noticeably more than the packet's standard proportion -- start around four teaspoons of powdered gelatin per pint, less if the stock is well gelatinous on its own. Set it in a shallow pan to a depth of about a quarter inch, chill until firm, then cut.
- Color pasteConcentrated coloring sold for confectionery work; the nearest modern equivalent is gel paste food color. Add it a dab at a time on a skewer tip -- very little will tint a pint of stock pale green.
- VegetablesFrozen peas and beans, cooked briefly and shocked in ice water, hold their color better than anything simmered to the tenderness the period expected. Carrots and turnips should be diced small enough to bind, about a quarter inch.
- Raw eggIf you make the mayonnaise from scratch it will never be cooked. Use pasteurized eggs, particularly if the salad is standing on a buffet.
- Assembly and yieldA dome is easier to build in a chilled bowl lined with plastic and inverted onto the platter than freehand. The quantities give roughly four and a half cups of dressed vegetables, enough for six as a first course or eight on a cold table. Chill at least two hours before decorating.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of many small diced things, the name generally traced to the ethnic patchwork of the Macedonian region and in use in French cookery writing well before this book was compiled. By 1900 the term had settled into the Anglo-American repertoire as a fixed idea: a jumble of cooked vegetables, cut to matching dice, bound and molded. The elaborate treatment here belongs to the age of the coated and decorated salad, when chaud-froid and aspic work borrowed from professional garde-manger practice moved into the ambitious home kitchen through books like this one. Gelatin was the enabling technology, having shifted within a generation from a laborious stock reduction to a packaged powder any cook could buy, and a great deal of period salad writing is essentially a set of instructions for making food hold a shape long enough to be admired.