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Cardoons with Beef Marrow
Take some cardoons prepared as in cardoons for garnish, arrange them in a silver saucepan, and pour over a little Spanish sauce. Blanch some beef marrow by placing it in boiling water, take it out, drain, and spread on pieces of toast cut about a quarter of an inch thick, two inches long and an inch wide; sprinkle these over with salt, glaze, and put them in a hot oven for four or five minutes. Arrange the cardoons on a dish, place the pieces of toast on top, and serve.
This is a garnish elevated into a course: braised cardoon ribs under toasts of poached marrow. The original leans on two cross-references — the cardoon preparation and the Spanish sauce — that a Waldorf cook would have had at hand and a home cook does not.
- Cardoons, and the prep that is missing hereCardoons are the leaf stalks of a thistle closely related to the globe artichoke, sold in winter at Italian and some Middle Eastern markets. Strip the strings as you would celery, cut into three-inch lengths, drop straight into acidulated water, and simmer until a knife goes through easily — 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on age. Cooking them in a blanc (water slackened with a spoonful of flour plus lemon juice) keeps them pale rather than grey.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: the brown mother sauce of veal stock, browned mirepoix and roux. A good demi-glace or a well-reduced brown veal stock does the same job. Use it sparingly, as written — this is a coating, not a stew.
- Beef marrowAsk for canoe-cut or cross-cut marrow bones and push the marrow out in whole cylinders, soaking overnight in cold salted water if it looks bloody. "Blanch in boiling water" is the period phrase, but marrow melts at a low temperature; slip it into water just off the boil for a minute or two until firm and opaque, then lift it out. A rolling boil will render half of it into the pot.
- GlazeTo "glaze" in this kitchen means to brush with glace de viande, meat stock reduced to a syrup, which gives the gloss. Reduced demi-glace works. The brief pass through the oven sets the glaze rather than cooking anything.
- Hot ovenTake that as roughly 400-450F. Four or five minutes is genuinely all it needs -- longer and the marrow slumps into the toast and the toast goes greasy.
- The toastsA quarter inch thick, two inches by one: small, firm, dense crumb. Toast them dry first so they hold the marrow, and lay the marrow on in flat slices rather than mashing it.
- Silver saucepanOrnamental in the original. Any nonreactive pan does; cardoons discolour in aluminium or bare iron.
- YieldOscar gives none. A pound of trimmed cardoon ribs and the marrow from two or three bones makes a side or a first course for four.
Cardoons and marrow is a Lyonnais standard — cardons à la moelle, traditionally eaten around Christmas in and around Lyon, where the cardoon has long been the winter vegetable of choice. The plant is the same species as the globe artichoke, Cynara cardunculus, grown for its blanched stalks instead of its flower buds, and it was common enough in nineteenth-century American market gardens to appear in seed catalogues before it slipped almost entirely out of the country's cooking. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is a fair measure of the Waldorf's kitchen: French repertoire, French sauces, and a cook expected to know what "prepared as in cardoons for garnish" and "Spanish sauce" meant without being told. Marrow itself was no luxury at the time — it was the cheap, rich part of the beef, and dishes built on it were a way of putting an inexpensive ingredient into very expensive surroundings.