Nouveau caveman food

My boyfriend picked up Jennifer McLagan's excellent Bones: Recipes, History and Lore a little while back and the cover photo of a couple roasted marrow bones, complete with parsley salad and marrow spoon had been taunting me from the kitchen table ever since.

While it is now terribly in vogue among a certain kind of gourmand to seek out the funkiest of meats ("duck fries", i.e. duck balls, from Incanto anyone?), I haven't laid a finger on anything more adventurous than chicken liver in ages. So we picked up some marrow bones from Drewes', determined to give it a shot, and cooked them up the other night after a lengthy stay entombed in the freezer.

It turns out that they're extremely easy to cook, but just require a little planning. Marrow bones must be soaked for 12-24 hours in a few changes of water to leech all the blood out of them. I'm not sure what would happen if you skipped this step, but I wasn't going to take any chances. Who knows what old, mouldering blood trapped in a cow leg tastes like. Here's what they looked like when they came out of the water bath, pale and bit ghostly:



You'd think that after having to soak the bones for ages, cooking them would also be a production. But it wasn't. It took about 15 minutes in the oven at 450 for them to cook through - although in all honesty, we left them in for a little too long and the marrow started to actually melt and flood out of the bottom of the bones. So I'd recommend checking on them periodically and pulling them when you can put a toothpick into the center w/ no resistance.

Marrow is tremendously rich - it tastes kind of like a steak distilled into butter that's made out of beef - so it's a good idea to have some bread and something sharp and peppery or mellow and sweet to eat with it. We ate ours with rounds of toast, an arugula-fennel salad and roasted beet soup to cut through the fattiness.

And not to sound like a broken record here, but I'd also like to point out that bones are just about the cheapest thing you can get from your local purveyor of pastured beef. Some meat CSA's even toss them in for free with your meat share. Of course, with all the high-end restaurants clamoring for them as well, that may not be true in San Francisco or New York.