Macedoine Salad

A cold cooked-vegetable salad of the plainest kind, and the sort of thing that lives or dies on how the vegetables are cut and how long they sit in the dressing. A few notes on the text and the technique.

• The jumbled ingredient lineThe ingredient list still reads "chopped parsley 2 tablespoons finely-", with the words out of order from the typesetting. Read it as two tablespoons of finely chopped parsley, stirred into the vegetables with the dressing.
• Cut everything to one sizeMacedoine means uniform small dice, conventionally about a quarter-inch. The recipe says carrot strips and potato cubes, but the salad reads as slapdash unless the beans are cut to match the same length or dice as the rest.
• Cook the vegetables separatelyCarrots, beans and potatoes all take different times and will turn to mush if boiled together. Cook each until just tender, drain, and spread out to cool so the potatoes do not steam themselves soft.
• Dress the potatoes warmWaxy potatoes absorb vinaigrette while still warm and stay bland if dressed cold. Toss the potato cubes with a little of the French dressing first, then fold in the beans and carrots once everything has cooled.
• French dressing, 1930s senseFrench dressing, older sense -- In an American book of this kind French dressing means a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt, pepper and often a little paprika or dry mustard. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
• Do not dress far aheadGreen beans hold their colour for perhaps an hour in an acid dressing, then go a dull olive. Combine within an hour of serving, and keep the shredded lettuce dry and separate until the plates go out.
• YieldThree cups of dressed vegetable in all; how many plates it covers depends entirely on the size of the "spoonful" the recipe calls for.