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Dessert

Macedoines

A layered fruit jelly dessert made with grapes, cherries, berries, currants, oranges, pineapples, brandied fruits, jelly, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 709 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Macedoines

Ingredients

Directions

Arrange the fruit

  1. Suspend a bunch of grapes, cherries, berries, or currants in the center of a jelly mold.

  2. Add sections of oranges, pineapples, or brandied fruits.

Layer the jelly

  1. Pour in a little jelly when it is cold but not set.

  2. Use ingenuity to arrange fruits in circles and pour jelly over each layer successively.

  3. Keep the jelly warm while the mold is on ice and the first layers are hardening.

Sugar the berries

  1. For berries and ripe fruit, strew sugar over them and let them stand for a few hours before scalding with the sugar.

  2. Use half to three-quarters of a pound of sugar for this process.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Grape + pineappletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Grape + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Currant + pineappletop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Jelly
Sets around the fruit so each layer holds its place in the mold.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws juice out of berries and ripe fruit.
Berries
Add juicy flavor and color to the layers.
Grapes
Give whole fruit pieces that show clearly when the mold is turned out.

The step that matters

Pour the jelly while it is cold but not set. If the jelly is too warm, it melts the fruit layer beneath and blurs the design; if it is already firm, the layers will not fuse. Keeping it warm and pouring in thin layers over chilled, partly set layers lets each one bond without mixing.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (grape, orange, pineapple, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against grape, orange, pineapple, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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