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Macedoine of Vegetables
2 cups mixed cooked vegetables ½ cup water 1 teaspoon beef extract or
Salt and pepper
½ cup stock
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon sugar
Mix all the ingredients together and cook eight or ten minutes over a hot fire, shaking the pan now and then. Serve hot.
A quick glaze for leftover cooked vegetables rather than a dish built from scratch. The ingredient list has been mangled by the book's two-column setting, so read it carefully before shopping.
- Untangling the ingredientsThe list is a collapsed two-column table offering alternatives: 1 teaspoon beef extract dissolved in ½ cup water, or ½ cup stock. You do not want both liquids. Add butter, sugar, salt and pepper to whichever you choose.
- Beef extractThis means Bovril, Liebig's or similar — a thick, dark, intensely salty meat concentrate. A modern bouillon cube or a teaspoon of concentrated stock paste stands in directly. Season at the end, since these are salty enough to carry the dish on their own.
- What a macedoine should beThe vegetables are best cut small and reasonably even before they are cooked — carrot, turnip, green beans, peas, potato in some combination. Modern kitchen convention puts a macédoine at about a ¼-inch dice, though period usage was looser. Ragged pieces make it look like reheated scraps rather than a composed garnish.
- Vegetables should be cooked alreadyEight to ten minutes over high heat is a glazing time, not a cooking time. Anything raw going into the pan will still be raw coming out, and anything overcooked will collapse into the sauce.
- The point of the shakingYou are boiling the liquid down to a buttery film that coats the dice. Shake rather than stir so the pieces stay whole, and pull the pan when the liquid is syrupy — if it goes dry the sugar will catch and burn.
- Heat level"A hot fire" implies a brisk boil so the half cup of liquid actually reduces in the time given; leave the pan uncovered to let that happen. On a low burner you will simply stew the vegetables in salty water.
- YieldTwo cups of vegetables serves three or four as a side, and the recipe scales up without difficulty as long as the pan is wide enough for the liquid to reduce.
Macédoine is French kitchen vocabulary for a mixture of vegetables or fruits cut into small, even dice, and the name is generally traced to Macedonia — a reference, so the story goes, to the many peoples gathered under Alexander's empire. By the time this book appeared, the term had passed into ordinary American and British household cookery, where it usually meant exactly what it means here: a way of presenting yesterday's boiled carrots, turnips and peas as something deliberate. The beef extract is the period detail. Commercial meat concentrates were cheap, shelf-stable and heavily advertised in the decades around 1900, and cookbooks of the era reach for them constantly as a substitute for the stockpot that a smaller household with a gas range no longer kept going.