No. 2650

Macedoine Salad

Salade Macedoine

Have four ounces of artichoke bottoms, four ounces of celery knob, four ounces of beetroot, four ounces of turnips all cut in quarter-inch squares, four ounces of string beans, cut lozenge-shaped, four ounces of asparagus tops and four ounces of green peas, all cooked separately in salted water, then refreshed, except the beetroots, which must be cooked whole and cut into squares afterward. Season with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, and mix with a fine herb mayonnaise (No. 612).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's macédoine is an exercise in uniformity: seven vegetables, four ounces each, every one cooked to its own point and cut to match. The dressing is almost an afterthought — the work is in the knife and the timing.

The hinge: cook each vegetable separatelyNothing here shares a pot. Peas, asparagus tips and beans need two to four minutes; diced turnip and celeriac five to eight; artichoke bottoms fifteen or more. Cooking them together guarantees some are mush and others raw.
Celery knobThis is celeriac, sold as celery root. Peel deeply — the outer layer is fibrous — before dicing. It is not celery stalk, and stalk will not substitute.
Beetroot, kept apartThe instruction to cook beets whole and dice them after is the difference between a macédoine and a pink smear. Roast or boil them unpeeled, cool, peel, dice, and dress them separately with a little of the oil and vinegar before folding in at the last moment, or serve them on top.
"Refreshed"Drained and plunged into cold or iced water to stop the cooking and fix the colour. Then drain again and dry well on a towel; wet vegetables thin the mayonnaise into soup.
Artichoke bottomsThe trimmed base of a large globe artichoke, cooked in acidulated water. Four ounces means roughly three or four bottoms. Good-quality jarred or frozen artichoke bottoms are an honest shortcut; marinated hearts are not, as the vinegar cure overwhelms everything else.
Lozenge-shapedCut the beans on a sharp diagonal into small diamonds about the same size as the quarter-inch dice, so the mixture reads as one thing rather than several.
Fine herb mayonnaiseRanhofer's No. 612 is a mayonnaise finished with fines herbes, the usual composition being chervil, tarragon, chives and parsley, finely chopped. About three-quarters of a cup of mayonnaise with two tablespoons of chopped herbs dresses this quantity. If you make the mayonnaise yourself, note that it contains raw egg.
Order of seasoningSeason the drained vegetables with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar first and let them stand a few minutes, then fold in the mayonnaise. Dressing an unseasoned mixture with mayonnaise alone leaves it flat.
YieldAbout a pound and three-quarters of cooked vegetables — eight small salad portions, or six as a substantial side. Best assembled within an hour or two of serving.

A Little History

Macédoine is generally traced to French culinary vocabulary of the eighteenth century as a jokey geographical figure: Macedonia under Alexander is often said to have been a patchwork of peoples, and so is a dish of many small vegetables cut to a common size. By Charles Ranhofer's day the term had hardened into a technique — a small, regular dice, usually given as around five millimetres, is still called macédoine in professional kitchens, alongside brunoise and jardinière. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades and author of The Epicurean (1894), gives it here in the cold, mayonnaise-bound form that would later travel through hotel dining rooms and eventually into the tin as Russian salad. The equal four-ounce weights are a reminder of what a nineteenth-century restaurant brigade had that a household did not: enough hands to bring seven vegetables to the pass at once.