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Buonbocconi
(Genoa.) Steep 1 pound of beef marrow, drain, chop, and pound it, and press through a sieve. Add 5 ounces of chopped candied peel, and citron, mixed; beat these with 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, and the zest of an orange, and the yolks of 2 eggs. Put a spoonful between two circles of puff paste, and bake them in a hot oven. Serve in a mound, with a good sauce.
Despite its place in the meats chapter, this is a sweet — small puff-paste turnovers filled with a candied-fruit forcemeat bound with beef marrow instead of butter. The marrow is the whole point and also the only fussy step.
- Steeping the marrow"Steep" here most likely means soaking the raw marrow in cold, lightly salted water for several hours or overnight, changing the water two or three times, to draw out blood and any splinters of bone. Skipping it will leave the filling less clean-tasting and duller in colour.
- Sourcing marrowA pound of marrow means the soft interior of split beef leg or shank bones; ask a butcher to saw them lengthways. Expect to buy several pounds of bones to yield a pound of marrow. Keep it cold until it goes into the pastry — warm marrow turns to oil and the filling will not hold.
- Pounding and sievingChopping, pounding and pressing through a sieve is the 1900 route to a smooth paste; a food processor, pulsed briefly on cold marrow, does the same. Do not let it warm up and emulsify into liquid fat.
- "Candied peel, and citron, mixed"Five ounces total, about 1 cup once chopped fine: half candied orange and lemon peel, half candied citron. Modern supermarket "mixed peel" is often dry and bitter; whole candied citron from an Italian grocer is closer to what a Genoese kitchen had on hand.
- A hot ovenFor puff paste, 425-450F. Bake 12-18 minutes depending on size, until well risen and deep gold. A cooler oven melts the layers before the steam can lift them and the marrow leaks out.
- Sealing the circlesCut two rounds of about 2 1/2 inches, mound a scant spoonful on one, brush the rim with water or egg wash and press the second on firmly. Any gap and the filling escapes and burns on the sheet. Chill the assembled pastries 20 minutes before baking.
- "A good sauce"The book assumes the cook knows what to pour over a mound of sweet pastries. A thin custard, a warm apricot or wine sauce, or plain zabaglione all suit; nothing savoury, despite the chapter heading.
- YieldThe quantities give roughly 20-24 small pastries. They are richest warm and turn waxy cold, so serve them the day they are baked.
Buonbocconi — "good mouthfuls" — belongs to a long European line of sweet pastries enriched with beef marrow rather than butter, a habit inherited from medieval and Renaissance cookery, when marrow was prized as the finest of fats and appeared in tarts, puddings and pies across Italy, France and England; the English marrow pasty and mince pies made with marrow are cousins. Genoa is a fitting address for the recipe: the city was one of the great Mediterranean centres of candied fruit, and "Genoa citron" and Genoese candied peel were traded far beyond Liguria. The placement of a sugared pastry among the meats and entrees may reflect how these compilations were organised, and Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) was gathering regional dishes from correspondents and cookbooks abroad, keeping their local names and often their original brevity, on the assumption that a reader already knew how to make puff paste and what a good sauce meant.