Gertrude Mackay’s 1913 Recipe for ‘Apple Macedoine’
“Cut a thick slice off the stem end of red apples, core and remove the pulp with a potato ball cutter. Cook one-half cup of sugar with one cup of water. Add clean rose geranium leaves and apple balls; cook until the balls are tender. When the syrup is cold, add the juice of one lemon and a couple of peaches sliced into small pieces. Fill the apple shells with the mixture and serve very cold as a first course at a luncheon.”
Gertrude Mackay, Two Hundred and Nine Ways of Preparing the Apple (1913)
This sounds like a rather fun and fancy way to serve up an apple. I’m presuming that a potato ball cutter would have been very similar to a modern-day melon ball cutter – and of course, now I’m intrigued as to why and how you’d cook potato balls… deep-fried, perhaps? – so one of those should do nicely.
Scoop balls out of your apples and then gently poach the apple balls in a rose geranium infused sugar syrup. Leave it to cool, then add lemon juice and chopped peaches, before re-filling the apple shells. Lovely! And served as an aperitif, rather than a dessert? Classy. Very classy indeed.
Of course you might be wondering, as was I: are rose geranium – which is actually Pelargonium graveolens, not a Geranium at all1The reclassification and division into Geranium / Pelargonium happened in 1738, so it’s really not too soon to get on board with the correct naming scheme… – leaves edible? Yes they are, according to several reasonably reliable-looking online sources, including Herbal Reality. Bit it’s hugely important to note that not all Geranium / Pelargonium spp. are edible, so please don’t grab handfuls of whatever you have in your garden without double-checking first.
And no, I have no idea why such a dish might be named in honour of Macedonia, as the title rather suggests, but no doubt Gertrude had her reasons.
What do you think? Does this sound like a pleasantly light, tasty summer palate tickler? Or a bit too much faff and nonsense? Do let me know, via the comments.
Footnotes
- 1The reclassification and division into Geranium / Pelargonium happened in 1738, so it’s really not too soon to get on board with the correct naming scheme… ↩︎
Macedoine is used in the French culinary tradition to denote little bits (usually squares or cubes) of cut up fruit or vegetables. Gertrude must have thought this qualified as such: the potato baller is also, traditionally, somewhat smaller than a melon baller/scoop
Thank you Tom! Good to know. I still wonder at the connection to Macedonia though… someone on BlueSky suggested the term ‘Macedoine’ was coined to reflect the different peoples of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander, which is an intriguing idea.