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Beef Marrow Quenelles
Put one-half pound of marrow into a basin with an equal quantity of bread-crumbs, add two tablespoonfuls of flour, salt and pepper to taste, and work it into a smooth paste with the yolks of six eggs and the white of one. Take it out a little at a time, poach in boiling salted water, drain them, trim them round and serve very hot.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in its own right, and one that depends almost entirely on how gently it is cooked. The mixture is simple; the poach is where it succeeds or falls apart.
- Never let the water boilDespite the instruction to "poach in boiling salted water," a rolling boil will shred these. Bring the pan to the boil, then drop it to a bare tremble around 170-180F before the first quenelle goes in. They are done when they float and feel set, roughly four to six minutes for a walnut-sized dumpling.
- Sourcing the marrowHalf a pound of raw marrow means about three to four pounds of beef femur, ideally canoe-cut by the butcher so it lifts out in one piece. Soak the bones in cold salted water for several hours to draw out blood, then push the marrow free and keep it cold until you work it.
- Working it cold, then warmMarrow at refrigerator temperature is hard and will stay in lumps; marrow that has gone soft turns the paste greasy. Chop it fine while cold, then let it sit ten minutes at room temperature and cream it with a wooden spoon before the crumbs and eggs go in.
- What "bread-crumbs" meantIn an 1896 hotel kitchen this is dried, sieved crumb from stale white bread, not the coarse fresh crumb sold today. Half a pound of dry crumbs is roughly two cups.
- The egg proportionSix yolks to a single white presumably aims at richness with only as much white as is needed to set the shape; more whites would tend to toughen them. Egg size in the period is not specified, so judge the paste by feel rather than by count alone.
- Test one firstRest the paste half an hour in the cold so the crumbs swell, then poach a single small quenelle. If it disintegrates, work in another spoonful of flour; if it is heavy and dense, slacken it with a little cold stock or cream.
- Shaping and trimming"Trim them round" implies the shapes were pared to a neat form after moulding, however they were first made up. Two teaspoons dipped in hot water give a neat quenelle without any trimming at all.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly thirty small quenelles, enough to garnish eight to ten bowls of clear soup. They are meant to be lifted from the poaching water straight into hot consommé or beef broth; held on a plate they cool and firm quickly.
Marrow dumplings are a German and Austrian soup garnish of long standing -- Markklösschen or Markknöderl, floated in clear beef broth -- but marrow quenelles also belong to the French classical repertoire, so it cannot be said that this is simply a Viennese dumpling wearing a French name. French was in any case the professional language of the grand-hotel dining room. Beef marrow itself was a valued fat in the nineteenth century, prized for richness in everything from puddings to sauce Bordelaise, and a hotel butchering whole carcasses would have had it in quantity. Its near-disappearance from home cooking in the twentieth century, and its return on restaurant menus in recent decades, says more about changing attitudes to animal fat than about the ingredient.