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Beef Marrow Patties
Blanch one-fourth pound of sweet almonds and pound them in a mortar, adding occasionally a few drops of orange flower water. When quite smooth, mix with them two heaped tablespoonfuls of flour, the beaten yolks of three eggs, and sufficient warm water to make the whole into a smooth paste. Butter some small shallow moulds, line them with the paste, brush them over with paste brush dipped into well-beaten yolk of egg, and bake them in a slow oven. Chop and flavor some marrow with lemon peel, and mix some sweet cream with it. When the patties are cooked, take them out of their moulds, put a small piece of marrow mixture in each, spread them over with white of egg that has been whipped to a stiff froth, and dredge lightly with powdered sugar. Put them in the oven to set the egg, then place them on a dish that has been garnished with a folded napkin, or an ornamental dish-paper and serve very hot.
A sweet almond-paste shell filled with marrow and finished with meringue — closer to an eighteenth-century marrow tart than to anything savory, despite the name. Two things decide the result: the marrow, and how briefly it sees the oven at the end.
- Get the marrow rightAsk a butcher for canoe-cut beef femur bones; a large bone yields only 2 to 3 ounces. Poach or roast the marrow out and cook it through until translucent before chopping, then chill it firm. The final trip to the oven only sets the egg white and will not cook raw marrow.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven for the shells is roughly 300 to 325F — you want them dry and pale, not colored. The recipe gives no temperature for the meringue finish, only 'put them in the oven to set the egg'; a moderate oven for a few minutes, just until it sets and takes a blush, is enough — longer and the marrow melts out.
- Almonds without a mortarA quarter pound of blanched almonds ground in a food processor works, but add the orange flower water a few drops at a time as the original says — the liquid keeps the nuts from turning to butter. Blanched almond flour is an acceptable shortcut; it will give a slightly drier paste, so expect to need a little more warm water.
- Orange flower waterModern bottlings vary a good deal in strength and can be assertive. Start with 1/4 teaspoon total for the whole batch and taste the paste before adding more; overdosed, it tastes of soap.
- The mouldsSmall shallow tartlet tins, barrel moulds or a mini-muffin pan all work. Butter them well and press the paste thin — it is an eggy nut dough, not a laminated crust, and thick walls stay soft in the middle.
- Why the yolk wash mattersBrushing the raw lining with beaten yolk before baking gives the shell some colour and a partial barrier against the wet marrow-and-cream filling; without it the paste is likelier to soften once filled.
- SweetnessThe only sugar in the recipe is the dredging on the meringue. If you want these to read as dessert rather than as a curiosity, sweeten the marrow mixture along with the lemon peel.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen small patties. They must go to the table at once — the marrow softens as it warms and the meringue weeps on standing.
Marrow baked into sweet pastry is one of the older habits in English and Continental cookery: marrow puddings, marrow tarts and marrow pasties, sweetened and scented with rosewater or orange flower water and studded with dried fruit, run through recipe collections from the seventeenth century well into the nineteenth. Marrow behaved like a rich, faintly meaty butter, and in kitchens that broke down whole carcasses it was a prize too good to waste. Oscar Tschirky compiled his book for the Waldorf in 1896, and this recipe reads like a survival “patty” here is the old sense of the word, a small pastry case, with no ground beef in sight. Its presence in the Waldorf kitchen, alongside the folded napkin and ornamental dish-paper, marks it as a formal-service sweet.