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Macedoine of Vegetables
This is made of one can of mixed vegetables; one tablespoon of beef extract; one teaspoon of sugar; one teaspoon of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper; two tablespoons of butter and one-half cup of water. Put the vegetables into a strainer, pour cold water over them and drain; then place in a stewpan with the other ingredients and cook eight or ten minutes over a hot fire, shaking the pan now and then. Serve hot. If beef extract is not convenient, use in place of it and the onehalf cup of water, one-half cup of stock.
A quick canned-vegetable side from an era when tinned goods were still a modern convenience worth naming on the menu. It needs almost nothing beyond a translation of the seasoning.
- Canned mixed vegetablesCan sizes were not yet standardized, so read this as roughly a pound of vegetables. Frozen mixed vegetables work in its place, though they will need a minute or two longer and no rinsing.
- Why rinse firstPouring cold water over the drained vegetables washes off the flat, metallic packing liquid. Skip it and the beef extract has to fight the can.
- Beef extractThis means a concentrated meat paste of the Bovril or Liebig type, not liquid gravy browning. A teaspoon of modern bouillon paste is in roughly the right range for a tablespoon of the old extract, though strengths varied; taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt.
- "A hot fire"Medium-high heat. The point is to boil off most of the half cup of water so the butter and extract glaze the vegetables rather than leaving them sitting in broth.
- Eight to ten minutesThat is generous for vegetables already cooked in the can. Five is usually enough to heat them through and reduce the liquid; longer and the peas and carrots collapse.
- Shaking, not stirringCanned vegetables break up under a spoon. Shaking the pan keeps the dice intact, which is the whole visual point of a macedoine.
- The stock substitutionHalf a cup of good beef or veal stock replaces both the extract and the water, as stated. With unsalted homemade stock, hold back on the salt until the liquid has reduced.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; one can will stretch to about four small side servings.
A macédoine in French cookery is a mixture of vegetables or fruits cut to a uniform small dice, the name generally traced to Macedonia and Alexander's empire as a byword for a mixture of peoples — a piece of kitchen wordplay that appears in French culinary writing well before it reached American household books. Classically the dish meant carrots, turnips, green beans and peas, each cooked separately to the same size and bound with butter or sauce, and it was a test of knife work. What is striking here is that The Butterick Cook Book (1911) hands the whole job to a can: by the early twentieth century commercially canned vegetables were cheap, reliable and marketed hard to the middle-class housekeeper, and a dish that had signified patience in the professional kitchen became a ten-minute weeknight side. The beef extract does the same work the separate cooking liquors once did, lending savor to vegetables that lost most of theirs in the tin.