Macedonia Recipe. According To Artusi And In My Opinion

Fruit salad?
No thanks, I take a macedonia.

The forgotten and rediscovered fruit salad.

For decades, macedonia has disappeared from the Italian table.
If at the restaurant you asked, not for a fruit salad, but just for fruit at the end of a meal, you would be offered pineapple. And in a country like Italy, rich in many varieties of fruit, it was almost paradoxical, even ridiculous.

Then the fruit salad got smart.
Good morning, I’m a fruit salad and… it worked!
Not only it’s back on the restaurant menu. For the first time Italians have begun to find fruit salad, ready to eat, at the supermarket. This is appreciable.

If it were not for the excessive use of plastic containers and the presentation.
The fruit doesn’t look fresh, which makes it inviting and makes you want to buy it.

Anyway, I was saying? Yes, fruit salad is cooler and thanks to this semantic camouflage macedonia is catching up.

Artusi and the recipe for the macedonia.

In the book that marks the birth of modern Italian cuisine, it is recognized as part of the Italian gastronomic heritage that Artusi tastes and reviews.

At the end of the nineteenth century, he included the recipe for “Signora (Miss) Macedonia” in the first edition of his cookbook Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1891).

Its version is a sort of layered and frozen fruit composition, for what it was possible in an era without freezers.

The gastronome was the only one in Italy who proposed introducing an Italian version of the French-derived term. He would have liked to call the fruit salad “miscellany of frozen fruit, which will be especially welcome in the fiery months of july and august’.

But it was the word macedonia that appeared in an Italian dictionary in 1918.

Origin of the name macedonia.

Today is a “mixture” of fruit, cut into small pieces that can be served naturally or seasoned. It ranges from traditional sugar and lemon to a drop of liqueur (vodka, rum, prosecco). Some people prefer to add in yogurt or ice cream.

But once fruit salad was made (mainly) with vegetables and the term is an Italian linguistic adaptation of the French word macédoine.

The Italian name appears -probably- for the first time in La cuciniera piemontese (1815), an adaptation of the French recipe book of 1740, Le cuisinier guascon. Two recipes appear in the Italian version and, in both cases, was a salad of vegetables cut into small pieces, boiled, mashed in butter, or served with sauce. Does it remind you of anything? Sure, the Russian Salad. But this is another story. And another recipe.

In short, it was born as a savory recipe and, from the beginning, it includes chopped food.
But the term, macédoine, where does it come from?

Look what the dictionary says (so we also clean it from dust):

Etymology: ← from Fr. Macédoine, prob. with allusion to the mixture of different bloodlines that met in the Macedonian empire.

Macedonia recipe is a mixture of different things on the same plate. Do you get the story?

The fruit salad to me.

Organic, seasonal, well presented.

The fruit salad’s all here in my opinion. This classic recipe doesn’t need to be reformulated in an extravagant way, it’s perfect in its simplicity. At most it just requires a little imagination and attention in the presentation. After all, we start to eat with eyes.

If it is to go, I use jars with lids. The same for snacks and buffets in the garden to avoid insects or, worse, wasps.

At the table, I prefer to use classic glass cups or use the shells of melons or small watermelons as containers for the fruit salad itself. If you add prosecco, don’t forget to put a straw and a couple of ice cubes.

Et voilà, le jeux sont fait!
Monica

Stay in the know!

Food Tips

• Use a large watermelon as a single bowl to place on the table.
• If you serve macedonia in glass jars for a buffet, you can add yogurt at the bottom.
• Macedonia for picnic: in this case don’t put yogurt in the jar. I don’t like to see a dirty jar. Rather, don’t fill the fruit jars completely and bring some yogurt aside so, whoever wants, adds in.
• Wet all the fruit with a few drops of lemon juice diluted in water to keep the colors bright.
• Use brown sugar to sweeten.

Macedonia Recipe

serves 2
Ingredients

1 small watermelon or 1 melon
one peach
1 small pear
one apricot
blueberries or blackberries, 50 g
1 fig
some cherry or strawberry
juice of 1 half lemon

Directions

Cut the melon or watermelon in half, empty with a digger, wet the fruit with a few drops of lemon and keep the pulp aside.

Wash the fruit, dry it and cut it into pieces, except berries and cherries that I leave with the petiole.

Drizzle with a few drops of lemon.

Fill the shell like a bowl.

Keep it in the fridge, serve it with some ice cubes.

You can season with fresh leaves of basil or mint.