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Marrow Dumplings
Pour over two stale French rolls as much boiling milk as will soak them well. Squeeze them dry, and beat them until they are smooth. Beat two and a half ounces of marrow and butter, mixed together until like cream, and add these ingredients to two well-whisked eggs, thoroughly mixed, make into small balls, and drop these into boiling soup, or if intended as an accompaniment to roast meat, into boiling water. Marrow dumplings may be seasoned to adapt them to the dish for which they are intended. They are much used in Germany, but are not much known in England, except in the western counties, where they are principally composed of suet, flour, etc. Time, twenty minutes to boil. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for ten dumplings.
A German soup garnish written down for English readers who had never met one. The recipe is sound, but it is short on the two things that decide whether the dumplings survive the pot: the consistency of the mixture and the temperature of the liquid.
- Do not let the liquid boilDespite the instruction to "drop these into boiling soup", a rolling boil will break these dumplings apart — there is no flour scaffolding, only bread and egg. Bring the liquid to the boil, then drop the heat so it barely trembles before the dumplings go in.
- Test one firstPoach a single dumpling before shaping the rest. If it disintegrates, work in a spoonful of fine dry breadcrumbs or flour; if it is heavy and dense, loosen the mixture with a little of the soaking milk.
- Stale French rollsNot baguette. A Victorian French roll was a small, light white roll with a thin crust. Any plain white roll a day or two old will do; cut away the toughest crust before soaking. The recipe gives no weight, so judge by the two rolls rather than by scale.
- Two and a half ounces of marrow and butterAbout 70 g of the two combined; the recipe does not say in what proportion, so equal parts is a guess rather than an instruction. Beef marrow is sold as marrow bones; roast or blanch them, scoop the marrow out, and chill it slightly so it creams rather than melts when beaten with the butter.
- Seasoning is not optionalThe original leaves it to the cook. Salt, black pepper, a good scrape of nutmeg and chopped parsley are the standard German treatment; for beef soup add a little grated onion softened in butter first.
- Twenty minutesLong by modern habit but correct here — the egg and marrow need time to set through and the bread to swell. Small walnut-sized balls will be done at about fifteen; anything larger wants the full twenty.
- Yield and useTen dumplings, which is a garnish for four to six bowls of clear beef broth rather than a dish in itself. "Probable cost, 6d" is the sixpence of the later nineteenth century, when marrow bones were among the cheaper things a butcher sold.
These are Markklösschen or Markknödel, the marrow dumplings that float in clear beef consommé across southern Germany and Austria, close cousins of the liver dumpling (Leberknödel) and the bread dumpling (Semmelknödel) — all three built on the same frugal base of stale white rolls soaked and squeezed. Cassell's is unusually candid about the borrowing, noting that they are "much used in Germany, but are not much known in England", and the comparison it draws with the suet-and-flour dumplings of the western counties is the real point of the entry: England had its own dumpling tradition, heavier and starchier, and this was offered as the refined continental alternative for a soup course. Marrow itself was cheap, plentiful and highly regarded in Victorian kitchens — marrow bones were served as a savoury in their own right, with toast and a long spoon — and its use here as an enrichment rather than a meat is characteristic of a period that wasted very little of an animal.