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Macedoine Jelly with Cream
Prepare a macedoine jelly. Beat up in a copper basin placed on ice two gills thick cream to a stiff froth, adding to the cream two ounces powdered sugar, a teaspoon vanilla essence, a tablespoon macaroons, and briskly beat two minutes more. Unmould jelly on a cold dish, drop cream into a pastry bag with a dentilated tube at bottom, then carefully decorate jelly all around and serve.
A finishing recipe rather than a standalone one: it assumes you have already made the macédoine jelly from elsewhere in the book, and tells you how to dress it. Everything here hinges on the cream being cold enough to hold a piped shape.
- Two gills of creamA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup (about 240 ml). Use heavy or whipping cream at 36% fat or above; anything lighter will not hold a piped line against a cold jelly.
- The copper basin on iceA metal basin set on ice chills the cream fast; any metal bowl chilled in the freezer for fifteen minutes does the same work. Chill the whisk or beater as well.
- "Beat two minutes more"Timings for hand whisking do not translate to a stand mixer. Stop at firm peaks that just hold their shape; beaten much past that the cream turns grainy and eventually breaks into butter and buttermilk, which cannot be piped.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Either works; two ounces is roughly half a cup of modern confectioners' sugar, and it is a fairly sweet cream by current taste.
- A tablespoon macaroonsCrushed dry macaroon crumbs, not whole biscuits; the recipe adds them along with the sugar and vanilla and then beats two minutes more. Use a crisp almond macaroon, not the soft coconut kind; the crumbs should be fine enough to pass through a piping tube without clogging it.
- Dentilated tubeA toothed or serrated tube, in other words a star tip. A medium open star gives the ridged rosettes and shell borders the book has in mind.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm, not hot, water for five to ten seconds, loosen the edge, and invert onto a chilled plate. The recipe whips the cream first, but unmoulding beforehand means the cream can go on stiff and immediately.
- ServingOne cup of cream whips to roughly two cups, enough to border a moulded jelly. Assemble and serve within an hour; unstabilised whipped cream tends to weep against a cold gelatin surface if it stands.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of small, evenly cut pieces, most often fruit for a sweet dish and root vegetables for a savoury one. The name is generally traced to the mixed peoples of Alexander's Macedonian empire, invoked as a byword for variety, though this is traditional explanation rather than settled etymology; the word appears in French culinary writing well before this book. Set in a clear wine or lemon jelly and turned out of a fluted mould, a macédoine was a familiar cold sweet on hotel and restaurant menus of the period, since it could be built in advance and finished at the last moment with piped cream. The instruction to work in a copper basin on ice, and to pipe rather than spoon, suggests professional service writing rather than domestic advice: the recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to make the jelly and needs only the garnish specified.