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Fresh Macedoine Salad
With a small Parisian potato scoop, scoop out all you can from six medium, scraped carrots and four peeled medium, white turnips; place in a saucepan with a quart water and half teaspoon salt and boil thirty-five minutes. Drain well on sieve, then place in a cool place and let cool off. Add then four tablespoons cooked cold green peas, four tablespoons cold cooked string beans, cut in short pieces, two tablespoons cold cooked fresh or canned asparagus tips and half a small cold cooked cauliflower (but nothing but the perfect flower) in small pieces. Season with four tablespoons dressing, gently mix all well together and serve.
A straightforward composed vegetable salad whose only real problem is the boiling time. Everything else is assembly.
- The 35 minutesCarrot and turnip balls cut with a melon scoop are small, and thirty-five minutes in salted water will reduce them to mush that collapses when you toss the salad. Boil the carrots 8-10 minutes and the turnips 6-8, separately, until a knife just meets resistance, then drain and cool. Firmness is the whole point of a macedoine.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. The small end of a double baller gives the pea-sized spheres this recipe assumes; a half-teaspoon measuring spoon works if pressed.
- Cooling"Place in a cool place and let cool off" assumes cooling without mechanical refrigeration. Spread the drained vegetables on a tray so they cool fast rather than steaming in a heap, then chill. Warm vegetables thin the dressing and go slack.
- The dressingThe quantity is given but not the kind. "Dressing" in a cold vegetable salad of this period usually means a French dressing of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar; a thin mayonnaise is another plausible reading. Four tablespoons is a light coating, not a bound salad.
- TurnipsWhite turnips here means small young ones, not rutabaga. Large winter turnips turn bitter and woody and will dominate everything else in the bowl.
- CauliflowerThe instruction to use "nothing but the perfect flower" is about appearance: only the tight white florets, no stem, no discoloured curd. Cook it separately and briefly, since cauliflower boiled with anything else picks up its colour and gives back sulphur.
- Scraping carrotsScraping with a knife was standard when carrots came out of sand; a peeler is fine, but take off as little as possible so the balls stay bright orange rather than pale.
- YieldScooping balls from six carrots and four turnips leaves only a fraction of each vegetable, so with the additions expect roughly 3 to 4 cups, enough for four to six as a side salad. It holds a day covered in the refrigerator; dress it shortly before serving.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of small, evenly cut vegetables or fruit, the name often said to derive from Macedonia as a byword for a region of many mingled peoples — a culinary joke about diversity in one dish. By the late nineteenth century it was a fixture of professional garde-manger work, where uniformity of cut mattered as much as flavour, and the Parisian scoop was one of the tools that turned ordinary root vegetables into something that looked deliberate on a platter. Its appearance in an English-language cookbook of the period reflects how thoroughly French restaurant vocabulary had been absorbed: the technique is French, the vegetables are whatever the market had, and the appeal is largely visual. The reliance on cooked-and-cooled vegetables also marks it as a dish built for a kitchen with leftovers to use and an icebox to keep them in.