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ingredients for a Florentine of Marrow.
Photo: Elizabeth Urbach |
The Challenge: #14 -- Fear Factor.
What
foods have you always wanted to attempt, but were afraid to attempt to make -
or afraid to eat? Choose a dish that is either tricky to create or
nerve-wracking to eat, and get adventurous! It’s historical Fear Factor!
I
could have re-done Calf's Foot Jelly from earlier in the year, but I had
trouble finding fresh calves' feet. I
could have done Beef Tongue, but a few other people chose the same thing, and
while I will probably try it myself later, I preferred to work with a different
ingredient, to give the challenge postings more variety. I also thought about doing stuffed beef
heart, or kidneys, but had trouble finding fresh ones, even at the local
Filipino grocery store. Then I saw beef
marrow bones at my regular grocery store, and that sealed the deal. I've heard of marrow bones being a popular dish
even into modern times, but never having had them before, I didn't know what
the commotion was about. I was a bit
turned off by the thought of eating blood, but the bones didn't look very
bloody when I bought them, and I was intrigued.
Instead of making a modern recipe like Osso Bucco, I looked through my
historic recipes and saw that marrow could be substituted for suet and butter
in boiled puddings, as well as used as the filling for fritters, tarts, and
other sweet dishes, mixed with spices, dried fruit and candied citrus
peel.
The
history of eating bone marrow goes back to prehistoric times. Archaeologists are always finding bones and
bone fragments in the kitchen refuse heaps that are dug up, and it seems that
until the Medieval era, the bones were simply roasted or boiled for broth, and
then broken to extract the marrow, which was then eaten as a dish by
itself. Removing the marrow and using it
as an ingredient in other recipes became very common by the 16th
century, with recipes for rissoles, pies, puddings, and tarts containing marrow
in the filling, with sugar, spices, and dried fruit. The 17th and 18th
centuries seem to have been the heyday of marrow's popularity, with multiple
recipes for marrow puddings, both boiled and baked, marrow tarts, pasties,
fritters, and other sweet dishes. By the
19th century, marrow seemed to be most popular as a dish of
beef-bones, roasted or broiled, replaced by suet and butter in puddings and
other desserts, although many Victorian cookbooks still include a recipe for
marrow pudding.
Recipe
books, along with other publications, record the rapid increase in knowledge
and innovation characteristic of the Enlightenment, with new dishes, and new
names for old dishes, abundant. The
Florentine is one such dish; a variation on a regular custard tart, Florentines
are baked puddings, in a puff pastry crust, or simply in a buttered dish with
an edging of puff pastry, with a filling of eggs and cream or milk, with any
combination of sugar, marrow, butter, suet, fruit, sweetmeats, spices or other
flavorings, and bread crumbs. Generally
sweet, Florentines could also be savory, with vegetables, herbs, marrow or
suet, and gobbets of meat as the filling.
I chose to re-create a recipe from 1674 because I had all the
ingredients already; the book, English
and French Cook, is on Google Books.
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