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Boiled Marrow
Carefully and sharply split with a cleaver a fresh marrow bone, or have your butcher do it. Pick out all the marrow without breaking and cut it into twelve even slices. Have a pint boiling water in a small saucepan with half teaspoon salt. Gently drop the marrow into the boiling water, immediately remove the pan from the fire and let the marrow blanch for five minutes. Remove it with a skimmer and use as directed.
This is a component preparation rather than a finished dish: blanched marrow slices to be laid on toast, floated in consommé, or set on a steak. The whole method turns on gentle heat.
- Off the heat, alwaysThe pan comes off the fire the instant the marrow goes in. Marrow is nearly pure fat and will melt away to nothing in genuinely boiling water; the residual heat of a pint of water is enough to set it firm and grey-pink in five minutes.
- Getting the marrow out wholeAsk the butcher for canoe-cut (lengthwise-split) femur bones, which release the marrow in one intact cylinder. Chilling the bones thoroughly first makes the marrow firm enough to lift out with a thin knife or your thumb without shattering.
- Soaking firstMany cooks now soak the extracted marrow in salted iced water for several hours, changing the water once or twice, to draw out blood before blanching. It gives paler, cleaner slices and is worth the time.
- SlicingThe recipe asks only for twelve even slices; cut the cold marrow into rounds of roughly equal thickness. Warm marrow smears; cold marrow cuts cleanly.
- QuantitiesA pint of water and half a teaspoon of salt is barely seasoned by modern standards. If the marrow is going straight onto toast rather than into a sauce, salt the water more generously or finish the slices with flaky salt.
- Use it at onceBlanched marrow does not keep or reheat well; it slumps into grease. Lift it out with a skimmer, drain on a cloth, and serve within a few minutes, or hold it briefly in warm — not hot — stock.
- YieldTwelve slices will stretch across several portions as a garnish, or make a smaller number of servings on toast.
Beef marrow was a standard larder fat and a standard luxury in European cooking long before it became a restaurant fashion: it enriched forcemeats and puddings, was creamed into marrow dumplings for clear soups, and appears in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery as the fat in marrow pasties and boiled puddings. Blanched slices set on a beef fillet are associated with the French garniture bordelaise, served with a red-wine and shallot sauce, and the technique here — drop in, pull off the heat, five minutes — is close to the classical preparation for that garnish. Marrow bones were generally inexpensive butcher's stock, which may be part of why a book of this kind treats the trimming of them as a routine skill.