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Macedoine of Vegetables

A dish of carrots and turnips simmered in broth with butter, sugar, and salt, then tossed with peas, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, French beans, and sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Macedoine of Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Scrape and smooth the carrots and turnips.

  2. Shape the carrots and turnips into forms like olives and filberts using a vegetable scoop.

Cook and combine

  1. Boil the shaped vegetables in broth or water with butter, sugar, and salt until done.

  2. Drain the vegetables and place them in a small pan with cooked green peas, asparagus peas, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and diamond-shaped French beans.

  3. Add thick white sauce, pepper, and salt, then toss lightly over heat.

Serve

  1. Serve as indicated.

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. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Asparagus + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Turnip + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Peas + asparagustop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together808 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the main structure and sweet, colourful body of the dish once boiled.
Turnips
Add firm texture and a mild, slightly peppery flavour to the mixed vegetables.
Thick white sauce
Coats the vegetables, adding richness and a creamy moisture that binds them together.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded richness to the vegetables as they cook in the liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the shaped vegetables until done. Carrots and turnips are dense, so they need enough time to soften through the centre. Boiling them just to the surface tenderness leaves them unevenly cooked, while overcooking makes them mushy and lets sugars and flavour leach into the water.

Swap the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, butter, sugar, peas, asparagus, cauliflower):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, butter, sugar, peas, asparagus, cauliflower. 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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