Skip to main content
Main

Macedoine of Vegetables, American Style

A cooked vegetable dish of carrots, beets, parsnips, celeriac, turnips, onions, and mustard in broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Macedoine of Vegetables, American Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan and lightly fry the chopped onion.

  2. Parboil the carrots, beets, parsnips, celeriac, and turnips separately for a few minutes, then drain.

Cook the vegetables

  1. Add the parboiled vegetables to the saucepan with enough broth to cook them.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, and cook slowly until done.

Finish and serve

  1. Carefully dish up the vegetables.

  2. Prepare the small white glazed onions separately and add them to the dish.

  3. Reduce the gravy, stir in the mustard, and pour it over the vegetables.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that softens the chopped onion and adds richness to the gravy.
Carrots
Provide sweetness and colour as the main body of the vegetable mix.
Beets
Add earthy sweetness and a deep colour to the vegetable mix.
Broth
Cooks the vegetables and forms the gravy that is later reduced.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the sweetness of the vegetables and gravy.

The step that matters

Reduce the gravy. Reducing concentrates the broth through evaporation, giving a fuller flavour and a gravy thick enough to coat the vegetables. Stir in the mustard after reducing so its sharp flavour is not dulled by long cooking.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, carrot, parsnip, turnip, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, carrot, parsnip, turnip, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesParsnip CakesParsnip Cakes12 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes