Friday, September 06, 2002

My kingdom for two tablespoons of beef marrow! It took us three days to get a shank bone; Eric finally managed it after a tri-grocery trek at last brought him to Jefferson Market. Here's my plug for Jefferson Market: It's in the Village, ground zero for precious gourmet groceries catering to people who don't cook, and when you go in you would think the place was run by Deluca's small-time little brother, but two years ago, when I was doing a little catering, I needed five pounds of shrimp heads and shells for stock, and the fish guy got the stuff for me -- for free! So I'm all about the Jefferson Market. Eric was accompanied on his lonely journey, supposedly, by our alleged friend Helen, who has often maintained that the Julie/Julia Project is all done with mirrors. She had called me at work, despondent over the return of her boyfriend back across the pond, and thinking to her distract herself with an investigation. But she herself failed to provide compelling evidence of her existence by coming out to assuage her Andy-sickness with steak and potatoes. Apparently, after having traipsed around the village looking for cow bones, even the intrepid Ms. Chernikoff quailed at the subway ride back to Bay Ridge. (As it turns out, we have very few friends with the character to make their way to the outer outer boroughs just to eat a good meal in a messy, un-air-conditioned apartment. Go figure.) Meanwhile, I was at home making preparations for Puree de Pommes de Terre a L'Ail. That's garlic mashed potatoes to you and me. And talk about labor intensive. You start out by separating the cloves of two heads of garlic -- two heads of garlic....[insert Homer drool here] -- and boiling them for a minute. Then you peel them. Then you cook them slowly in butter for twenty minutes. Then you make a roux with the butter and some flour. You pour in some milk that you have oh-so-presciently gotten up to the boil in another pot (I can't help thinking about JC's Smithsonion-ensconced kitchen -- the pegboard, the rows on rows of pots. Wonderful, but somebody's always got to wash the suckers.) You simmer it all together. You push the whole mess through a sieve, which has got to be the most annoying chore that Julia asks for on a regular basis, then you simmer it again. Then you set it aside and start boiling the potatoes, if you haven't been oh-so-prescient and gotten them started already. By this point you're thinking, "Oh, for cripes sake! I've got a whole jar of garlic powder right here!!!" And I haven't even gotten to the beef marrow yet. At 8 o'clock, worried about the husband and friend who still haven't appeared, I open the Book to the page on extracting beef marrow. "Stand the bone on one end and split it with a cleaver," writes Julia. "Hm," says Julie, alone in her Bay Ridge kitchen. "This sounds like something that will not be as easy as it sounds. And me with no meat cleaver." The door at that moment opened, revealing the intrepid Eric bearing cow bone. Julie gives him a stricken look. "Time to extract the beef marrow." My hearty Eric leaps cheerfully into the breach. After we hack at the thing with my biggest knife for a little bit, which, it immediately comes apparent, is not nearly knife enough for the job, he digs out a hacksaw from some closet and begins sawing away. This is one big bone -- a veal bone, actually. If this is the baby, I'd hate to see what Mama looks like. After a good ten minutes of intensive labor -- I'm talking sweaty brow, the whole nine yards -- he's managed to cut into the thing about an inch and a half. There's some truly horrifying oozy pink stuff on the blade, which I suppose is exactly what we're looking for, but we still can't get into the thing. We boil it for a few minutes -- this is not what Julia would have me do. But apparently neither my husband nor I have the way with beef marrow bones that the great JC does. Then I go after it with a knife, and manage to worm my way into the interior. The pink stuff begins to drip out. This is somehow not how I imagined beef marrow. It's like guts, kind of. I stick my smallest paring knife into the center of the bone past this hilt, and scrape the stuff out. "Once we get our place in New Mexico," murmurs my husband as he looks on, mesmerized, "We're going to have to get ourselves a rescue cow. And treat it really nice." It's true. I'm an inveterate cow eater, but this invasion of a leg bone is rather squirmingly intimate. We get maybe a tablespoon and a half out of it. It's going to have to be good enough. After that, it's all downhill. I'm making Bifteck Saute Bercy, which is pretty much the same steak I made last week, only with more butter, parsley and beef marrow. Very quick to make. The marrow -- which looks kinda raw to me -- gets stirred in to the reduced sauce, off heat, at the very end. Eric thinks you can't get Mad Cow from marrow, but I tell ya what, I'm going to cook it a little anyway, just in case. The potatoes get mashed in with the garlic puree, thinned a bit with cream. The Tomates Grillees au Four are nothing but whole tomatoes brushed with olive oil and roasted in the oven for a few minutes. It's a gorgeous meal. The potatoes were incredibly delicious, smooth and pervasively but smoothly garlicky. The tomatoes were simple, and lent just the right counterpoint. If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn't have worried. The stuff was rich, meaty, intense in that nearly too-much way I associate with real French food. Our francophile friend Helen was nowhere in evidence. But if there was no Helen, we would have to invent her, and so we did, wishing her well as we ate our deliciously French cow. 7:43:42 AM    comment []