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Beef Marrow Fritters
Put one-half pound of marrow, taken from the largest bones of the animal and kept in one piece, into cold water and let it soak. Put it in a saucepan with good broth, boil for ten minutes, and then let it cool in its liquor. When quite cold drain and cut it into two dozen slices; cover half of them on one side only with some cooked fine herbs, and over that again put a layer of cooked truffle and glaze it all over (both truffle and marrow) with a paste brush; when the glaze is cold take the pieces of marrow singly, dip them into frying batter and fry them; when the batter is dry and of good color drain the fritters, put them on a napkin folded on a dish, arrange them in a heap, and serve them with a garnish of fried parsley.
A late nineteenth-century hotel garnish that reads as fussy but is mostly waiting: the marrow has to be poached, chilled hard, and kept cold until the moment it hits the fat. That is the hinge — warm marrow slumps and leaks out of the batter.
- Sourcing the marrowHalf a pound of marrow in one piece means the femur or shank bones, ideally canoe-cut lengthwise by a butcher so the core lifts out whole. Expect to need several pounds of bone to get 8 oz of marrow, though the yield varies.
- The soakCold water, several hours or overnight in the refrigerator with a change or two, draws out blood and keeps the marrow pale. Oscar assumes a cold larder; use the fridge.
- "Good broth"An unsalted or lightly salted beef stock. Ten minutes at a bare simmer is right — a hard boil melts the marrow into the pot. Cooling it in its own liquor firms it and stops it drying.
- "Cooked fine herbs"Most likely a mixture chopped fine and sweated in butter until dry enough to stay put; period usage of cooked fines herbes varied, sometimes closer to a duxelles with mushroom and shallot, sometimes the herb mixture alone. Either way it should be a paste, not loose leaves.
- The glazeGlaze is glace de viande — stock reduced to a syrup that sets to a tacky film when cold. It is the glue holding truffle to marrow, so reduce it far enough that a spoonful jells on a cold plate.
- An ambiguity worth namingThe instruction to dress only half the slices, then to fry them "singly," is not resolved in the original. The likely reading is that each garnished slice is capped with a plain one to make a sandwich, giving twelve fritters from twenty-four slices; the text does not say so outright.
- Frying batter and fatA plain flour-and-egg pâte à frire, thick enough to coat. Fry at 350–375F; below that the batter drinks fat and the marrow melts before the crust sets.
- Fried parsleyParsley must be bone dry before it goes near hot fat, and it needs only a few seconds — it crisps and turns bright, then blackens fast.
- YieldTwelve fritters if the slices are paired as suggested above, twenty-four if each is fried alone; enough for roughly six as a hot hors d'oeuvre or as a garnish for a roast.
Marrow was a delicacy in nineteenth-century European kitchens rather than the offcut it later became: it appears on toast in English cookery, stirred into risotto alla milanese in Lombardy, and in French practice as beignets de moelle, of which this is a hotel-scale version. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, put his name to the 1896 book, and the tell here is the technique stack — poach in stock, chill, glaze with reduced meat essence, batter, deep-fry — which belongs to the French professional garnish tradition rather than to anything distinctively American. Truffle and meat glaze mark the dish as restaurant food.