No. 2755

Macedoine a la Montigny

Cut carrots into small quarter-inch cylindricals, turnips into five-sixteenths inch in diameter balls, string beans into lozenges; also have small flageolet beans and peas. Blanch and cook each vegetable separately, drain, fry together colorless in butter, and mingle in a good soubise sauce (No. 543), thickening when ready to use with a little fresh butter and seasoning. Bread-crumb and egg over some small teaspoon chicken quenelles (No. 155), fry them in clarified butter, drain and range them around the dressed macedoine.

← No. 2754 Lettuces with Thickened Gravy—Braised Other Vegetables No. 2756 Mushrooms a la Raynal—Mousserons →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Ranhofer vegetable garnish that depends on two cross-references most readers will not have to hand: soubise sauce (No. 543) and chicken quenelles (No. 155). Both are straightforward once translated.

Soubise sauceIn essence a thick onion puree: blanched onions stewed in butter until soft without colour, then bound with bechamel (or thick veloute) and sieved. Make enough to coat the vegetables, not pool around them.
Chicken quenellesA pounded raw chicken forcemeat of the classical type, worked with a panada and butter and lightened with egg and cream, shaped with two teaspoons. A modern food processor does the pounding in a minute. They need to be poached in barely trembling salted water or stock until firm before being breaded and fried, as the recipe assumes.
Cut each vegetable to size, then cook separatelyThis is the hinge of the dish. Carrot cylinders, turnip balls and bean lozenges cook at different rates, and the whole point of a macedoine is that every piece is uniformly tender and holds its shape. Blanch and refresh each one on its own, then combine only at the butter stage.
FlageoletsThe pale green French shelling bean. Dried flageolets need soaking and about an hour of simmering; tinned ones, drained and rinsed, are acceptable here since they are only being warmed through.
"Fry together colorless in butter"Toss the drained vegetables in foaming butter over moderate heat just to dry and gloss them. Any browning at all is a fault in this dish, so keep the pan below the point where the butter starts to smell nutty.
Clarified butter for the quenellesWhole butter will burn before the crumbs colour. Clarified butter takes the frying temperature needed, or use a neutral oil with a spoonful of butter added at the end.
Thickening with fresh butterRanhofer appears to mean the usual mounting with butter: swirl in cold butter off the heat at the last moment to bind and gloss the sauce. Held over direct heat it is liable to split.
Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantities; as written it serves as a garnish for a large roast or as a vegetable course in its own right. Dress the macedoine in the centre of a warmed dish and ring it with the fried quenelles at the moment of serving, or the coating softens.

A Little History

Macedoine is traditionally explained as a joke about Alexander's empire -- a mixture of many small pieces living under one rule, here one sauce -- though that derivation is repeated tradition rather than documented fact; the culinary sense is attested in French from the eighteenth century. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York across two spells between 1862 and 1896, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a record of the restaurant's repertoire, and its vegetable chapter is full of these lapidary constructions in which carrots become cylinders and turnips become balls of a specified fraction of an inch. The precision is not fussiness for its own sake but kitchen-brigade shorthand: a garnish had to look identical whether it left the pass at seven o'clock or at eleven. Names like "a la Montigny" attached to such preparations were commonly honorifics for a patron, a place or an earlier chef, and in most cases the specific referent is no longer traceable. What survives is the method, which is still the classical way to build a macedoine.