Home › The World's Kitchen › Beef Marrow
Beef Marrow
Place a good-sized marrow bone in a warm place for thirty minutes. Then sharply knock the bone on a table on the large, open end, so as to have the marrow detach easily. Cut it into thin slices, gently drop it into half a pint boiling water with one-half teaspoon salt, and immediately remove the pan to the table and let stand in the water for five minutes. Lift up the marrow with a skimmer and use as required.
This is a component preparation rather than a finished dish: blanched marrow to be dropped into consommé, spread on toast, or folded into a marrow dumpling or bordelaise-style sauce. The whole point is heat control.
- The hinge: never let it boilMarrow is almost pure fat with a low melting point, so a rolling boil turns the slices to grease and cloudy water within a minute. The instruction to pull the pan off the heat the instant the marrow goes in is the entire technique — the residual heat sets the outside while the centre stays intact.
- Half a pintOne cup of water, with half a teaspoon of salt. That is enough for the marrow from one or two bones; use a small pan so the slices stay submerged.
- Getting the marrow out'A warm place' means somewhere warmer than a cold larder: half an hour is enough to soften the fat so it is no longer rigid. Rapping the bone works on a straight shank; a modern alternative is to ask the butcher for canoe-cut (lengthwise split) bones, which let you lift the marrow out whole with a spoon handle.
- Soaking firstMany cooks now soak the marrow in cold salted water in the refrigerator for 12 to 24 hours, changing the water once or twice, before blanching. It draws out blood and gives a paler, cleaner-tasting result — worth doing if the marrow will be visible in a clear soup.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe says only 'thin slices.' Rounds of about a quarter-inch hold their shape reliably; very thin slices are more likely to break up. Chill the marrow briefly if it is too soft to cut cleanly.
- YieldA large beef shank bone may give only a couple of ounces of marrow, though this varies a good deal with the bone. Marrow bones are cheap but the edible return is small, so buy several.
- Holding and storingBlanched marrow keeps two days covered in the refrigerator and is best brought back with gentle heat only — a warm oven or the surface of hot soup, never a hot pan.
Marrow was standard equipment in European kitchens long before it became a restaurant fashion. Medieval and early modern cookery used it as a rich fat in pastry and sweet puddings, and from the early eighteenth century onwards the specialised silver marrow scoop appears among English silver forms, made expressly for digging it out of a roast bone at the table. The blanching method given here belongs to French professional practice, where moelle is poached and reserved as a garnish e la la bordelaise, dropped into consommé, or beaten into the marrow dumplings (Markklösschen) of German and Austrian soup cookery.