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Marrow Patties
Prepare as for MARROW TOAST. Drop into boiling water, in which a little salt is dissolved, the marrow cut into small pieces, and boil for one minute. Drain it, and put it into a saucepan with a tea-spoonful of parsley, chopped, a tiny bit of shallot, half a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, and pepper and salt to taste. Toss these ingredients lightly together until they are hot, fill the patty-cases, which should be already baked, and serve. Time to prepare, five minutes.
A five-minute savoury filling for pre-baked pastry shells, built on beef bone marrow. Everything depends on handling the marrow gently — it is mostly fat and will melt away to nothing if it gets hot for long.
- What "marrow" means hereBeef or veal bone marrow, not vegetable marrow (which in British usage is a summer squash) and not marrowfat peas. Ask a butcher for marrow bones cut into 2–3 inch lengths, or buy them split lengthwise, which makes extraction far easier.
- Getting the marrow outThe recipe simply refers back to Marrow Toast for this stage. The usual method is to soak the bones in cold salted water for several hours to draw out blood, then push the marrow out whole with a thin knife or the handle of a spoon. Warming the bones very briefly loosens it, but any real heat starts rendering the fat.
- The one-minute boil is the hingeMarrow is largely fat and melts at a low temperature. The brief minute in the salted boiling water the recipe calls for firms the outside just enough for the pieces to keep their shape; leave it longer and it will begin to melt and break up. Lift it out as soon as it firms.
- "Toss until hot"Use the lowest heat you have and move the pan rather than stirring hard. The goal is warm through, not sizzling — the parsley and shallot should stay fresh-tasting.
- Patty-casesSmall baked pastry shells, usually of puff paste, closest today to bought vol-au-vent cases. The recipe assumes they are already baked; warm them separately and fill only at the moment of serving or the pastry goes soft.
- "A tiny bit of shallot"Read this as no more than a quarter of a small shallot, minced very fine. Raw shallot in a barely-warmed filling stays assertive, and it will otherwise flatten the marrow's mild sweetness.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities at all: judge the marrow by the number of cases you have to fill. Serve immediately; reheated marrow separates and turns oily.
Bone marrow was a prized delicacy in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, eaten far more freely than it is now: Cassell's gives it on toast and in patties, and specialised marrow-spoons — long, narrow and often double-ended — were a real and recognisable item of cutlery, commonest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The little pastry case, meanwhile, is generally traced to French professional cookery as absorbed into English service, where a patty or vol-au-vent gave the kitchen a way to serve a tiny quantity of something rich in a portable, elegant form. Recipes of this sort belong to the era's habit of thrift dressed as luxury: the bones were nearly free with the joint, yet the result was fine enough for the savoury course. Marrow fell out of English domestic fashion in the mid-twentieth century and is often said to have returned largely through restaurant cooking, where roasted marrow bones with parsley and shallot — essentially this same combination — became a fixture again.