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Marrow Ball Soup
Procure two pounds of soup meat with a marrow bone, a small piece of liver and kidney; remove the marrow from the bone; place the meat and bone in a soup kettle; cover with cold water, set the kettle over the fire; as soon as it boils add one finely cut onion, one leak, one small white turnip, one small carrot, one-half cupful of finely cut celery; a bouquet of herbs, and one-half teaspoonful of salt. Simmer slowly for three hours. In the mean time, rub one heaping tablespoonful of marrow to a cream, add the yolk of an egg, season with one-quarter of a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of nutmeg, and one teaspoonful of finely chopped parsley; mix and add three tablespoonfuls of grated bread crumbs and the white of the egg beaten to a stiff froth; make into a dozen small balls. Remove the meat from the soup when done, and strain the soup into a clean saucepan. Return to the fire; when it boils add the dumplings and boil for six minutes. Add more seasoning if necessary and serve.
A clear beef broth with marrow dumplings, in the Austrian and southern German manner. The broth is straightforward; everything hinges on the marrow balls holding together.
- The hinge: test one ball firstDrop a single dumpling into the simmering broth before committing the rest. If it disintegrates, work another spoonful of crumbs into the mixture; if it is heavy and tight, thin it with a teaspoon of broth. Boiling water will tear them apart, so keep the pot at a bare simmer despite the instruction to boil.
- Getting the marrowAsk for beef marrow bones cut into two-inch lengths, or split lengthwise, which makes the marrow easy to scoop. Note that the recipe's two pounds is the soup meat, the marrow bone included; a single good marrow bone should still yield more than the heaping tablespoon needed for the dumplings, and the remainder can go into the pot. Let the marrow come to room temperature before you rub it to a cream, or it will stay in lumps.
- "Leak"A leek. One medium leek, white and pale green only, split and rinsed thoroughly of grit.
- Bouquet of herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stems, a bay leaf and a sprig of thyme tied with string or bundled in cheesecloth so it lifts out whole before straining.
- Salt is deliberately lowHalf a teaspoonful is a seasoning for the meat, not for the finished soup; the recipe gives no water quantity beyond 'cover with cold water.' Salt properly at the end, after straining, which the recipe allows for with 'more seasoning if necessary.'
- Liver and kidneyBoth are there for depth, and both cloud the broth and can turn it bitter if overdone. Keep the pieces small, an ounce or two of each, and skim the grey scum steadily during the first twenty minutes.
- Straining and fatStrain through a fine sieve or dampened cheesecloth, then skim the fat. Chilling the strained broth and lifting the set fat off gives a much clearer result, and the soup can be made a day ahead to that point.
- Soup meatShin, chuck or short rib. The boiled meat is not wasted; in the Austrian boiled-beef tradition it was served sliced with horseradish or a green sauce as a separate course.
- YieldAbout four to six servings, at two or three dumplings each.
Marrow dumplings, Markklösschen, belong to the clear-soup tradition of Austria and southern Germany, where a well-made beef broth was judged first on clarity and then on what floated in it: liver dumplings, semolina dumplings, pancake shreds, or these. The technique of creaming raw marrow with egg and breadcrumbs is the same principle as a forcemeat panada, and it works because marrow is soft enough to whip at room temperature and firm enough to set when heated. Its appearance in an American general cookbook reflects both the influence of German immigrant cooking and the period's assumption that a household would buy bone, liver and kidney alongside the soup meat as a matter of course. Marrow was then cheap and ordinary; the same bones now sell at a premium.