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Macedoine of Vegetables
Cut a small, raw carrot with a vegetable scoop, put the pieces into boiling salted water and cook for fifteen minutes; repeat the same with a small raw turnip, cooking each vegetable separately. Drain and place them in a saucepan with one gill of cooked peas the same quantity of cooked string beans, about one-half inch in length, two tablespoonfuls of cooked flagelots and a small piece of cauliflower. Moisten with one-half pint of hot bechamel sauce and season with one-half pinch each of salt and pepper and a little grated nutmeg. Allow it to simmer gently for ten minutes, and use as required.
A classic French garnish reduced to its essentials: everything is cooked separately, then bound in a little béchamel at the last moment. The finished dish is only as good as the uniformity of the cuts.
- The hinge: cook each vegetable apartCarrot, turnip, peas, beans, flageolets and cauliflower all soften at different rates, and the point of a macédoine is that every piece keeps its own colour and bite. Boiling them together produces a grey, uneven mash no amount of sauce will rescue.
- A gillHalf a cup, so half a cup each of cooked peas and cut string beans. The half pint of béchamel is one cup.
- Vegetable scoopWhat we call a parisienne scoop or small melon baller, roughly 1/2 inch across. Neat 1/4-inch dice is an acceptable substitute; the pieces just need to match the peas in size.
- FlageoletsPale green immature kidney beans, still sold dried and in jars. Dried ones need soaking and then roughly an hour, sometimes longer, of simmering before they enter this recipe; canned cannellini are the nearest easy stand-in.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingThat is a long time for scooped carrot and turnip and will leave them very soft, particularly as they then simmer ten minutes more in the sauce. Eight to ten minutes to just-tender, then shocked in cold water, holds up far better.
- Cauliflower quantity"A small piece" is vague; about a cup of small florets, cooked separately until barely tender, balances the other vegetables. Add it at the end and stir gently, since florets break up easily.
- Half a pinchOscar's kitchen used the pinch as a working unit, generally reckoned at about 1/8 teaspoon. Season after the sauce goes in, since the bechamel may already be seasoned.
- YieldAbout four side servings. It is written as a garnish to be held and spooned alongside roast or boiled meats rather than served as a course.
Macédoine entered French culinary vocabulary, by most accounts in the eighteenth century, as a joke about the Macedonian empire of Alexander, a single state assembled from many different peoples; the name is generally traced to that comparison, and it was applied to any dish of assorted diced vegetables or fruits. By Oscar Tschirky's era it was standard hotel work, the kind of preparation a garde-manger turned out in quantity to plate beside entrées, and the uniform scooped shapes were as much of the point as the flavour. This version, bound in béchamel rather than dressed cold in vinaigrette, is the hot service form, the sort of thing a kitchen like the Waldorf's might have sent up alongside a meat course; the presence of flageolets, then still an unmistakably French bean, marks it as kitchen-French rather than American home cooking.