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Marrow Bones (Take the bones from two legs)
Take the bones from two legs of beef and saw them into pieces about four inches long. Scrape them well to clean them and put them in cold water to soak. Place them in a saucepan side by side, not standing up, cover with good stock, boil up quickly and then remove to the side of the fire and cook slowly for an hour and a half. Take out the bones, drain them, place on a napkin spread over a dish, and serve with slices of hot toast.
A straightforward Victorian savoury that survives unchanged on restaurant menus, though the timing here belongs to an era of much larger, colder bones and slower fires.
- The hinge: don't cook the marrow outAn hour and a half in liquid will leave most of the marrow rendered into the pot and the bones half empty. Boiled marrow bones need roughly 15-25 minutes at a bare simmer, until the marrow is soft and translucent but still seated in the bone. If you prefer the modern restaurant treatment, roast them upright at 450F for 15-20 minutes instead.
- Getting the bonesAsk the butcher for beef shin or femur cut into 4-inch lengths; a home cook cannot saw these safely. Two legs of beef will give you far more than a household needs, and marrow bones are usually sold by the piece today. Reckon two pieces per person.
- SoakingThe cold-water soak is not optional padding. Several hours, or overnight with a change or two of water, draws out blood and keeps the marrow pale rather than grey. A tablespoon of salt in the water helps.
- Laying them flat"Side by side, not standing up" keeps the marrow from sliding out of the open ends into the stock. Some period cooks also sealed each end with a paste of flour and water before poaching.
- "Remove to the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant a cooler zone away from the firebox. On a modern hob it is the lowest setting that keeps the liquid trembling rather than bubbling; hard boiling agitates the marrow loose.
- Good stockA light beef or veal stock, unsalted or barely salted, since it will concentrate. Water works too. Save the poaching liquid for soup afterwards.
- The napkinThe recipe has the bones set on a napkin spread over the dish, which is standard period service; it will also soak up drips and stop the hot bones sliding. A rack or a bed of coarse salt does the same job.
- At tableServe with hot dry toast, flaky salt and something acidic to cut the fat, such as a parsley and shallot salad dressed with lemon. Long thin marrow spoons were standard equipment; the handle of a teaspoon works.
Marrow bones were a fixture of English and Anglo-American dining rooms well before Oscar Tschirky set them down for the Waldorf, and they belong to the tradition of the savoury, the small, salty course that closed a formal dinner after the sweet. Nineteenth-century cookbooks routinely gave them their own heading, and marrow spoons were made as standard silverware from the eighteenth century onward, which says something about how commonplace the dish was. Marrow also did quiet work elsewhere in the period kitchen, enriching forcemeats and puddings at a time when no fat was wasted. Oscar's version is notable mainly for its restraint: no sauce, no garnish, just the bone, a napkin and toast, which is roughly how the dish reappeared on ambitious menus a century later.