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Macedoine of Fruit
3 peaches
½ cup diced watermelon
1 cup raspberries
3 pears
½ cup diced pineapple
⅓ cup sugar
Pare and slice peaches and pears, cut pineapple and melon in small pieces, mix fruit and sugar, and chill for one hour. Serve each glass in glasses, adding one tablespoon whipped cream to each glass on the just before serving. A berry or piece of pineapple placed on the cream gives color to the dish.
A plain macerated fruit cup; the only technique in it is the hour of chilling, which draws juice from the fruit and makes the syrup. The text is garbled in places — "serve each glass in glasses" and "on the just before serving" are printer's errors — but the intent is clear.
- YieldThe quantities fill four to six glasses, depending on the size of the peaches and pears. The recipe specifies only that it be served in glasses.
- Don't skip the hourThe sugar has no liquid to dissolve in until the fruit gives up its juice. An hour in the refrigerator turns the sugar into a light syrup; served straight away, you get gritty fruit and no sauce.
- Pears must be ripeModern supermarket pears are sold hard and will stay hard, since there is no cooking here. Ripen them at room temperature until the neck yields to a thumb, or use a soft variety such as Comice.
- Peaches and pears brownBoth oxidise once cut. A squeeze of lemon over the slices as you go keeps the colour without noticeably altering the flavour.
- PineappleFresh is intended. Canned pineapple works but is already in syrup, so reduce the sugar by a tablespoon or two.
- Raspberries lastFold them in at the end rather than mixing and chilling with everything else; an hour sugared and jostled among the other fruit breaks them down and reddens the whole bowl.
- WatermelonSeed it and drain the dice briefly before adding. Otherwise it thins the syrup considerably.
- The creamA tablespoon of whipped cream per glass, added just before serving, as the recipe directs; the fruit juice will slacken it within a few minutes.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of small, evenly cut pieces — usually vegetables, but applied to fruit as well — and the name is generally traced to the Macedonian empire of Alexander, a byword for a jumble of different peoples under one rule. In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the term marked a fruit salad as something a little more formal than a bowl of berries and cream: cut to size, sugared, chilled, and served in glasses. That it appears in a Butterick volume is telling. Butterick sold dress patterns, and this dish asks for no stove, no thermometer and no skill beyond a paring knife. The garnish instruction — a berry set on the cream "gives color to the dish" — is the era's whole aesthetic in one line.