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Marrow, Croustades Of
Split a large marrow bone and take out the marrow. Put it into a small saucepan with enough water to cover it well, and a pinch of salt. Set on the fire, bring to boiling-point, then take out the marrow and lay it in cold water. When cold, drain it, and pound it with the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs; add a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a very little thyme, a pinch of salt, and a dusting of cayenne pepper. Mix well. Cut and fry some croustades; place them on a baking-tin. Spread the mixture on them, with a few brown bread-crumbs on the top, and put them in a hot oven for ten minutes. Sprinkle a little chopped parsley on top of each, and serve.
A Victorian savoury: poached beef marrow pounded with hard-boiled yolks and herbs, piled into fried bread cases and browned. The whole thing hinges on treating the marrow gently — it is almost pure fat and will simply melt away if it is boiled.
- The marrowAsk the butcher to split or saw the bone lengthways; the recipe wants one large beef marrow bone, though yields vary and a spare bone is useful insurance. Canoe-cut bones are the easiest to work with. Marrow bones are widely sold frozen; thaw overnight before use.
- Bring to boiling-point, and no furtherThe instruction is precise and worth obeying: the moment the water reaches a boil, lift the marrow out. A minute or two more and it renders to liquid fat. Chilling it in cold water firms it so it can be pounded rather than smeared.
- CroustadesNot the modern pastry cases. Here they are rounds or squares of crustless bread, roughly half an inch thick, fried in butter or clarified fat until golden, then drained; in this recipe the mixture is spread over the top rather than filled into a hollow. Cut them before frying; they will not cut cleanly afterwards.
- A hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a Victorian "hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F (220-230C). Ten minutes at that heat is enough to warm the filling through and colour the crumbs.
- Brown bread-crumbsMost likely raspings: dry crumbs, oven-dried until crisp and sieved, rather than soft fresh crumb (though crumbs of brown bread are a possible reading). Plain dry breadcrumbs stand in well; toss them with a little melted butter for better colour.
- PoundingA mortar gives the smoothest result, but a fork against the side of a bowl works. Do not use a food processor — the friction warms the fat and the mixture turns greasy rather than creamy.
- Seasoning"A very little thyme" is perhaps a quarter teaspoon of leaves, chopped fine. Marrow is bland and very rich; season the salt and cayenne firmly or the mixture reads as flat fat.
- Yield and servingOne bone's marrow with three yolks makes a small batch, enough for a handful of croustades. Serve hot, immediately, as a savoury course at the end of dinner or as a canape.
Croustades of marrow belong to the savoury, the small hot dish that closed a formal English dinner between the sweet and the dessert fruit — anchovy toasts, devilled kidneys, mushrooms on toast and their kind. Marrow was prized well before that convention: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery used it in puddings, in forcemeats and simply baked in the bone and spooned onto toast. The word croustade is French, generally traced back through Provençal and Italian crostata to Latin crusta, a crust, and describes any fried or baked case cut to hold a garnish; the borrowing signals the strong French influence on the professional and aspiring-domestic English kitchen of the 1870s onward. The recipe also reflects a household economy now largely lost — a butcher's bone cost next to nothing, and a cook could turn it into a dinner-table savoury.