No. 3560

Macedoine of Fruits and St. Jacques Cups

Macedoine de Fruits et Coupes St. Jacques

Macedoine.—Lay in a vessel one peeled banana cut in half-inch squares, one well-peeled orange having the meats lying between the intersections removed with a knife and all the seeds suppressed, a slice of pineapple half an inch thick cut in dice, four ounces of grapes, two ounces of strawberries or raspberries, four ounces of cherries, pears or peaches, half a gill of kirsch or maraschino and a little powdered sugar; mingle all together and keep it cold in a freezer with ice packed around; serve in a compote dish.

St. Jacques Cup.—With this macedoine fill some wide champagne cups; cover the macedoine with kirsch or maraschino sherbert and serve (see Fig. 691).

← No. 3559 Macedoine Croquettes Ices & Ice Creams No. 3561 Madeleine Ice Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

A macedoine is simply a mixture of fruit cut small and steeped in liqueur; Ranhofer's version becomes the St. Jacques Cup once it is topped with sherbet. Nothing here is difficult, but the measures and the chilling method need translating.

Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup, of kirsch or maraschino. That is a generous amount for the quantity of fruit given and can be cut back without harm.
Weights of fruitFour ounces of grapes is roughly three-quarters of a cup to a cup; two ounces of berries about half a cup; four ounces of cherries, pears or peaches about three-quarters of a cup once cut. The recipe gives no yield, but the whole should fill something like four to six compote dishes, or six small champagne cups.
The orange"The meats lying between the intersections removed with a knife" means supreming: cut away peel and pith to the flesh, then cut each segment free of its membranes. The membranes are what make an otherwise elegant macedoine chewy.
Keeping it cold in a freezerThe freezer here is the ice-cream pail; the recipe calls only for ice packed around it, which chills without freezing. An hour in the modern refrigerator does the same job. Do not actually freeze the mixture, as banana and berries collapse on thawing.
MaraschinoThe liqueur meant is the clear Italian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. Kirsch is the unsweetened cherry eau-de-vie; either gives the faintly bitter almond note the dish depends on.
SugarPowdered sugar in this book means finely ground sugar, close to modern superfine rather than confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. A tablespoon or two is enough, depending on the ripeness of the fruit.
The sherbet toppingFor the St. Jacques Cup the sherbet is an ice flavoured with the same liqueur, spooned over the fruit at the moment of serving. Assemble at the table or immediately before it, or the ice melts into the syrup and the two layers merge.
CuttingThe recipe gives half-inch squares for the banana and dice for the half-inch pineapple slice; it says nothing about cutting the grapes, berries or cherries. Pieces uniform enough to spoon up together are the point. Cut the banana last and turn it in the liqueur at once so it does not brown.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) records that kitchen's repertoire in exhaustive numbered order. Macedoine is French kitchen slang for a mixture of many small pieces, conventionally traced to the Macedonian empire as a byword for an assemblage of different peoples, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented; the term was applied to diced vegetables in aspic as readily as to fruit. A fruit macedoine belonged to the later stages of a long service menu, where something cold, sharp and alcoholic was wanted. The St. Jacques Cup shows the late-nineteenth-century restaurant habit of naming a composition after a saint, a place or a patron and serving it in a specific vessel, here the wide champagne cup the recipe calls for. The pineapple and bananas are a reminder of how far Delmonico's could reach for produce in the 1890s, when steam shipping had made tropical fruit a dependable luxury rather than a rarity in a Northern city.