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Marrow Dumplings, for Soup
Cut out the crumb of a light roll, and soak it for a minute in cold milk. Pour off the milk, and add two ounces of flour, half a pound of marrow, chopped, the yolks of six eggs, beaten to a froth, the crumb of a small roll toasted, and cut into small dice, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, and pepper and salt to taste. Stir all these ingredients well together, form them into small dumplings, boil them in weak stock, and afterwards add them to the soup. Time to boil, an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for eight persons.
A Victorian soup garnish of the German school: enriched bread crumb bound with beef marrow and yolks, poached and dropped into clear soup. Two things need adjusting before it works in a modern kitchen — the boiling time and the handling of the marrow.
- An hour is far too longSmall marrow dumplings are cooked through in 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer. An hour at a boil will either disintegrate them or leave leaden pellets; test one first and add the rest once you know the mixture holds.
- Simmer, never boilThe instruction says boil, but a rolling boil breaks these apart. Keep the stock at a lazy shiver, barely trembling, and lift the dumplings out with a slotted spoon into the finished soup.
- Getting the marrowHalf a pound (225 g) of raw marrow means several pounds of cut beef marrow bones, depending on the cut. Push it out of the warmed bones, chill it firm, then chop fine or press through a sieve; some cooks cream it like butter first, which distributes it more evenly.
- "A light roll"A soft white dinner roll, crust removed. The recipe gives no weights. The second roll's crumb is toasted and diced, so it reads as texture rather than binding.
- Six yolksThat is a generous amount of binder for this quantity, and eggs of the period were generally smaller than today's. With modern large eggs you may prefer to start with four yolks, judge the consistency, and add more only if the mixture will not hold a shape.
- Rest before shapingChill the mixture for 30 minutes before forming. Cold marrow and hydrated crumb firm up considerably and the dumplings hold their round far better.
- Cook them apart from the soupThe recipe is right to poach in weak stock rather than in the finished consommé — starch and fat cloud a clear soup. Use a thin stock or salted water you can discard.
- Yield and sizeSufficient for eight, and the recipe calls for small dumplings; keep them well under the size of a walnut so they cook through before the outside softens.
- Cost1s. 6d. was a real outlay for a garnish, the marrow and the six eggs between them accounting for most of it.
These are essentially Markklößchen, the marrow dumplings that float in clear beef broth across southern Germany and Austria, and their appearance in an English dictionary of cookery reflects the Continental influence on late-Victorian professional kitchens, where a properly garnished clear soup was the mark of a competent cook. Beef marrow was cheap and highly regarded in the nineteenth century: marrow bones were served on their own as a savoury with toast and a long spoon, and the fat was prized for the particular richness it gives without the greasiness of suet. It is one of a family of soup garnishes — quenelles, royales, profiteroles, dumplings — that a cook was expected to have at command and drop into whatever broth the menu required.