Home › Soup Accessories › Marrow Balls
Marrow Balls
Strain through cheesecloth two tablespoons of melted marrow, beat until creamy and then add a beaten egg. Season with pepper, salt and paprika, and add a little moistened bread so that balls may be formed. Poach these little balls in boiling water and add to the soup when served.
A classic German-Jewish and Austrian soup garnish, and one of the few uses left for beef marrow outside a roasted bone. The recipe assumes you know how much bread and how small the balls should be, so the proportions need pinning down.
- Getting the marrowAsk for two or three cut marrow bones, about 4 inches each; that yields well over the two tablespoons needed. Push the marrow out with a thumb or a small knife after soaking the bones an hour in cold water, then melt it gently over low heat and strain to remove membrane and bone chips.
- Beat it cold, not hotLet the strained marrow cool to the texture of soft butter before beating; if it is still hot the egg may begin to scramble when added. Creaming it also helps lighten the mixture.
- "A little moistened bread"In practice this is 3 to 4 tablespoons of fine dry breadcrumbs, or the crumb of a stale roll soaked in milk and squeezed dry. Add it a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds a shape; too much and the balls turn to dumplings, too little and they disintegrate in the water.
- Rest the mixtureChill the formed mixture 20 to 30 minutes before rolling. Cold marrow firms up and the balls hold together far better in the pot.
- Size and poachingRoll to the size of a small marble, no more than 3/4 inch; they swell. Poach at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil for 5 to 8 minutes, until they float and are set through. A hard boil breaks them apart.
- Test one firstDrop a single ball in before committing the batch. If it falls apart, work in another spoonful of crumbs; if it is heavy and dense, loosen it with a little beaten egg, holding back a spoonful of the egg when you mix for this purpose.
- Yield and servingTwo tablespoons of marrow with one egg makes roughly 18 to 24 small balls, enough to garnish 6 servings of clear soup. Poach in salted water or, better, in a ladleful of the broth itself, and add to the bowls at the last moment.
Marrow balls belong to the family of clear-soup garnishes that a well-run turn-of-the-century kitchen kept in its repertoire alongside egg balls, quenelles and custard royale. A clear cognate is the Austrian and southern German Markkloesschen, small marrow dumplings dropped into consomme, and such dishes are often said to have reached American cookbooks by way of German cooking and Jewish households where marrow was a familiar enrichment for broth. The recipe also reflects the period's insistence that nothing edible from a butchered animal be wasted: marrow bones were cheap, sold as soup bones, and the fat inside them was treated as a delicacy rather than a byproduct. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book to the same middle-class housekeepers it sold sewing patterns to, and a garnish like this one signalled that a plain clear soup could be dressed up for company without much expense.