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| Deviled Beef Bones. Photo: Elizabeth Urbach. |
The Challenge -- Sacred or Profane: "In this challenge, be as divine or as devious as you like!
It could be a food with connections to a religion, a dish served for sacred
celebrations, or a concoction with a not-so-polite name. Whatever your choice,
show us how naughty and/or nice you can be!"
In looking for recipes to fit this challenge, I thought
about making a Nun's Cake, or even a "bowl of smoking Bishop" as
mentioned in The Christmas Carol, but
in looking for fresh marrow bones to re-do the Florentine of Marrow from the
previous challenge, I found a recipe for Deviled Beef Bones that sounded
interesting. Plus, it can be a (very)
late entry for both the Fear Factor and Sacred or Profane challenges!
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. 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, served with toast or potatoes, or some kind of
starch. Narrow little marrow spoons
became available to make it easier to scoop the marrow out of the bones,
especially since recipes often called for the bones to be served cut into
fairly large pieces, more than an inch or two long.
I
found a recipe for Broiled Beef Bones from Cassell's
Dictionary of Cookery (1875) on the Food Timeline website, and just
underneath it, there was a recipe for Deviled Bones from the same book. The second recipe wasn't long on
instructions, so I improvised with the ingredient amounts, and consulted the
first recipe for cooking time. Deviled
bones, or kidneys, or anything else in a Victorian recipe, is generally called
that because it is intended to be cooked or served with a spicy sauce or spice
rub containing lots of pepper, or horseradish, or other "hot"
spices. This recipe called for a spice
rub of mustard, cayenne, and mushroom ketchup, which has ginger, pepper, and
other warm spices in it.
Never having eaten marrow bones, I had no real idea what to
expect. I didn't know how much marrow
I'd get out of each bone, or what the texture would be like. I don't have any marrow spoons, so I just
used a table knife, and it seemed to work all right. I had all the ingredients in my pantry, even
the mushroom ketchup, so I made the recipe as written, and served the marrow
with toast on the side, as instructed in a third recipe from the same
cookbook.
