Marrow
Kate Washington
In my family we gnaw the bones. We chew gristly bits that stick between my teeth. The sharp point of bone split smoothly with a butcher’s saw stabs my tongue when I pick up a lamb chop. My brother cracks chicken cartilage between his teeth, and any drumstick my father has eaten sports a sharp ragged edge where the bone has splintered; the joint itself is gone. My brother says it is because neither he nor my father has an overbite or underbite. Their teeth meet exactly, letting them grip every fibrous shred of flesh.
I leave a little more on bones. My front teeth have a small gap between them, which easily catches a floss of ligament or fibrous tendon but does not easily let it go. Still, I pry the crispiest bits of skin from the tail of the roast chicken, I suck the marrow from shanks and ribeyes, I push the tiny round cheeks from under the slate-gray skin of the trout my father and brother catch. (As a child I pushed out the eyeballs from the trout too, but I would not eat them; I just liked to roll the ball-bearing-sized cornea, hard as a tiny pebble, between my fingers.) I chew ice cubes, a habit that led me to love the taste of bourbon early when I fished the melting cubes from my parents’ abandoned glasses of bourbon and water.
My father, my brother, me: We all do this, nibble and pull away the uneven edges of pink meat where it attaches to tendon, to connective tissue, and we chew the tough unnamed silvery things that cleave muscle to bone. We crunch the gritty chicken gizzard in its membrane, which snaps under our teeth. We scoop out marrow, where it lurks at the top corner of a chop. The burnt purple-black edge of blood on the grayish lymphatic blob pressed up against coral-rough spongy pink bone, the soft slick center, the fatty lump from the center: If I didn’t get that prize from the center of the bone, my father would. And no matter how completely I chewed and gnawed that night’s dinner, my dad would reach across to my plate—on his left, the way we sat each night at our faux-wood-grain Formica kitchen table, with salt and pepper shakers shaped like little red and white mushrooms—and take the bones and gnaw them cleaner.
By the time I was six or so, I learned that if I left the marrow, it would be gone.
My father hunted, and occasionally in winter a skinned deer would dangle from our garage rafters, softly dripping blood when I walked past to get the dog food for Sunny. The dog was not usually allowed in the garage, for he would have chewed the thick soft-edged cardboard canister—reused from a long-ago shipment of pesticides to my dad’s almond orchard from Dow Chemical—to pieces to get at the Purina kibble inside. And of course, he would have taken down that bare muscled deer, when it was there. That can’t have been very often, but we usually did have venison somewhere in our freezer.
My mother would cook the fatless meat, with its flinty mineral tang of blood, in Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, spiked with sherry. She cooked stringy pheasant the same way, and the thin pork chops from the Holiday Market, too. The pork chops had their rim of faintly crisp fat, my favorite part, and the mushroom soup made the meat go softly chewy and gray at the bone, but still the meat—like that of the game—tended to be dry. The wild things were lean from the chase; the pigs of the seventies and eighties were lean from breeding, and whitely bland where the game meats were liver-brown and astringent with iron. No matter the meat, we ate it all, down to and within its very bones.
My mother would pick up a chop to eat the last bits, but I don’t remember her gnawing at them much as the rest of us did. She had bad teeth. But she never told us to put down the greasy half-blackened bones we were chewing on. Manners could be forgotten briefly when there was marrow to get.
My mother died in 2010, by suicide, after years of battling ever more difficult depression. A few nights later, my husband and I had a sitter and dinner plans. We were meant to go to a friend’s house for a group dinner party, but I was too raw, not fit for general dinner-table conversation, and so instead we went out to a restaurant.
On the way there we had the first real conversation we’d had alone in all that long week—a week in which we tried to keep things normal for our older daughter and got up in the night with the six-month-old baby and hosted my brother and made funeral arrangements and called relatives—and it all turned on a dime into the kind of searing fight that can break a couple if you’re not both careful. We parked too far from the restaurant; we blamed each other; we were both sunk in incoherent grief and shock and guilt. I arrived at the restaurant teary and cold, feeling as sharp and exposed as an edge of cut bone, hardly able to speak to the waiter or even to parse the menu offerings.
But there, on the appetizer list, was bone marrow. I ordered that, and a strong cocktail that was mostly bourbon.
Marrow, along with all the other offal and odd bits of animal, has become trendy in recent years. This marrow dish was the first I recall seeing in Sacramento, a town of conservative eaters. In this version, a thick and perfectly round calf femur was split horizontally, and roasted on a bed of salt on an iron plate in an extraordinarily hot oven. The marrow was seared and sizzling, on the verge of melting away, in its twin troughs of bone. It was topped with briny capers and parsley and it came with not quite enough rough-edged grilled bread to catch the tremulous melting fat.
This dish borrowed heavily from the classic French preparation, but in that, the bones are cut crosswise into cylinders a few inches high, and the diner has to dig the marrow out with a special spoon. The bones here were splayed, vulnerable, making the taking of the marrow almost too easy.
For those who might not have grown up being taught to gnaw the bones, the sight of those heavy ivory half-moons might have been offputting. For me, the heady smell and taste of so much rich and fatty marrow, so hot it could burn, was restorative—fulfilling, for once, the ancient and literal function of the restaurant. My husband and I had made reparations, reached a frail and painful peace. The atavism of eating the inside of bones, of drinking the liquor that my grandparents used to drown their sorrows, was exactly what I needed on that bleak February night.
And yet I wonder if we should split open a bone so casually, saw it to a smooth flat edge, so that we can spoon out the vulnerable marrow. I could not pick up those splayed-open bones; there was nothing to pick at in those restaurant-carved smooth surfaces.
The matter inside the bones is more intimate, harder to come by, than the blood in our veins. Our marrow makes our blood; it can make us immune to illness, though not to sorrow. What lives in the hollows in the bones is something you should work for, gnaw for. My family taught me that, from the time I was old enough to pick up a pork chop. But, as my mother also taught me, there is a time to stop fighting, and a time to reckon with what runs inside the bone.
Kate Washington‘s food and travel writing has appeared in Sunset, The Washington Post, Yoga Journal, and many other publications. She is a co-founder of Roan Press, a small literary publisher, and is at work on her first novel as well as a memoir. She lives in Sacramento, California, with her husband and two daughters.
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