Macédoine

This one is a mixture of textures and tastes and all kinds of vegetables—that's why it is called a macédoine. It's an odd route from Alexander the Great to your table, but Alexander, a Macedonian, had an empire consisting of many disparate states.

We chilled it in a wonderful old French copper mold that we borrowed, naturally, from Lucullus, and surrounded it with a macédoine of fruit.

Actually, this ethnic situation—a “macédoine” of peoples—was complicated even more from the 1860s on when some of the Slavs in Macedonia who had always called themselves Bulgarians (and were considered so by most foreign experts) began developing a Macedonian national consciousness.