Marrow Balls
1 tablespoon finely cut marrow fat 3 tablespoons fine stale bread crumbs 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon beaten eggs Salt and pepper Mix ingredients and work to a smooth paste, form in balls the size of a filbert, drop into boiling soup and cook for ten minutes.
A garnish dumpling for clear soup, and the quantities as printed make only a spoonful of paste — enough for three or four balls. Scale up by four or five for a pot of consommé serving six.
- Getting the marrowAsk a butcher for beef marrow bones, preferably centre-cut femur, and scoop the soft marrow out with a thin knife or the handle of a teaspoon. Marrow from bones roasted for stock is too cooked to bind; use raw marrow. It should be chilled firm before you chop it, or it smears rather than cuts.
- "Marrow fat"This means the marrow itself, not a rendered fat or the marrowfat pea. A tablespoon is roughly half an ounce, so one good bone yields several times the recipe.
- "1 teaspoon beaten eggs"Beat one egg, then measure a teaspoon of it. The rest keeps for a second batch or goes into the soup. The paste should just hold a shape without slumping — if it is slack, add crumbs a pinch at a time.
- Bread crumbsFine dry crumbs from stale white bread, not the coarse packaged kind and not panko, which stays gritty. Grind them fine or the balls break up in the pot.
- The size of a filbertA filbert is a hazelnut, so about half an inch across. Larger balls may not cook through in ten minutes and are wrong for a clear soup anyway.
- The instruction that mattersDrop them into soup at a bare simmer, not a hard boil. Rolling liquid tears them apart and clouds the broth, which defeats the purpose of a garnish for consommé. Test one first: if it disintegrates, work another spoonful of crumbs into the paste.
- SeasoningMarrow is very mild and the crumbs are bland, so season the paste more firmly than instinct suggests — roughly a scant quarter teaspoon of salt per doubled batch — and taste a poached test ball before shaping the rest.
- ServingThree or four balls per bowl of clear beef broth. They can be poached in salted water ahead of time and slipped into the hot soup at the last moment if you want the broth to stay bright.
Marrow balls are the American cookbook name for Markklösschen, the marrow dumplings that float in German and Austrian clear beef soups, and their appearance in a flour miller's promotional cookbook shows how thoroughly Central European soup garnishes had entered the standard turn-of-the-century repertoire alongside noodles, custard cubes and force-meat balls. Gold Medal, milled by the Washburn-Crosby company of Minneapolis, published its cook book to sell flour, and books of that kind leaned on short, standard-issue recipes like this one to establish themselves as general kitchen references rather than mere advertising.