Macedoine
Mix together a ten-cent cream cheese, a canned pimento (red) cut in tiny cubes, one-fourth a cup of small green string beans, cut in cubes, five olives, chopped fine, and enough cream to hold the mixture together. When thoroughly mixed, use a piece of paraffine or confectioner's paper to handle and give the mixture the original shape. Let IIO
A cream cheese log flecked with diced vegetables, shaped back into its original brick and sliced for a salad course. The text breaks off mid-sentence at the page turn, but the intent is clear enough to finish.
- "A ten-cent cream cheese"Period cookbooks generally mean one of the small grocer's packages of soft fresh cheese, commonly around 3 ounces. If that is right, a standard 8 oz block is nearly three times as much, so use about a third of one, or scale the vegetables up accordingly.
- Paraffine paperWax paper. It is used here only as a handling barrier so the softened cheese does not stick to your fingers while you press it back into a brick.
- "The original shape"The cheese comes out of its wrapper as a neat rectangle, gets mashed with the additions, and is then reformed into that same rectangle; presumably so it can be chilled and cut into slices, though the text breaks off before saying so.
- Cream, sparinglyAdd it a teaspoon at a time. Enough to bind is all that is wanted; a wet mixture will not hold a shape or take a clean cut, and the vegetables already carry moisture.
- Dry the vegetablesBlot the pimento, the beans and the chopped olives on a towel before they go in. Canned pimento in particular sheds a good deal of pink liquid that will loosen the cheese and streak it.
- The beansCooked and cooled, not raw. Boil young green beans until just tender, refresh in cold water, then cut into small dice the size of the pimento cubes so the cross-section looks deliberate.
- The missing endingThe sentence stops at the page break. Recipes of this type usually end by letting the shaped cheese stand on ice until firm, then cutting it in slices and serving on lettuce with French dressing or mayonnaise.
- YieldWith one small cheese, enough for a few slices; a light salad course for perhaps four.
Macédoine is French kitchen vocabulary for a mixture of vegetables or fruits cut in small even dice, the name generally traced to Macedonia as a byword for a region of many mingled peoples — a culinary pun that was already old by the nineteenth century. Classically a macédoine is dressed on its own or set in aspic; here it is folded into cream cheese instead, which is very much of its moment. The small factory-made cream cheese brick, sold for a dime and kept on ice by the city grocer, had been on the market since the 1870s and 1880s, and cookbook writers were busy finding things to do with it beyond spreading it on bread. Canned pimento seems to have arrived in American kitchens around the same period and gave cooks reliable red year-round; between the two, a cook could produce a colored, molded, sliceable salad in ten minutes without a jelly bag or a mold in sight.