Editor’s Corner
On Eating Bone Marrow
T
HE FIRST TIME I ATE BONE MARROW was, fittingly, shortly after
I spoke on marrow failure at a conference in Milan, where osso
bucco with saffron risotto is a local specialty. The tiny, back-alley
trattoria where I could afford dinner on a hematology fellow’s
salary was praised in a guidebook written by public television’s
European travel guru, Rick Steves. (At the time, I bore a close
resemblance to Steves. When friends later pointed this out, it
suddenly was clear to me why Italian restaurant owners seemed
so friendly and generous, and why antipasti so often showed up
at my table “on the house.”)
I grew up in a middle-class home in 1970s suburban New Jersey, where food was plentiful but culinary options were limited.
My Dutch mother was a competent cook and often made rich
desserts, but dinners were heavy on boiled vegetables, mashed
potatoes, and the less expensive cuts of meat from the local A&P
supermarket. My dad grilled, but, like many men of his generation, he considered the linoleum-floored kitchen to be slippery
foreign territory.
Our family didn’t go out to eat much – maybe once or twice
a year – and either to the local red-sauce Italian restaurant, or a
classic greasy-spoon diner owned by a family friend. I didn’t try
seafood or any dish originating in Asia until I left for college. Eating bone marrow in a café in Milan, therefore, felt absurdly exotic.
Both the name and the hearty flavor of osso bucco come from
the marrow in the center of a cross-cut veal shank. Chef Anthony
Bourdain calls marrow “God’s butter,” and for good reason.
Accurate nutritional information about marrow is surprisingly
hard to come by, but marrow is so rich that, in his novel Walden,
Henry David Thoreau made it a metaphor for carpe diem: “I
wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” High in
protein, fats, and essential elements, and clocking in at around
250 calories per ounce, marrow packs a potent nutritional punch.
Once upon a time, back when indentured servants in
New England complained about their masters serving them a
diet with too much lobster (considered then a low-class meat
because of the work involved in eating it), eating marrow was
more common in the West than it is today. No proper 18th-century kitchen was complete without a marrow spoon, the scoop
of which looks like a hypertrophied biopsy needle. Martha
Stewart demonstrated the use of marrow spoons in a recent
episode of her television show, ladling mouth-watering cooked
marrow onto toasted croute and obviously enjoying herself,
pronouncing, “It’s a good thing.”
Surely the English theologian and geologist William Buckland
must have tried eating marrow. A noted 19th-century eccentric,
Buckland was known for intentionally eating his way across the
animal kingdom, from crocodiles to panthers to weasels. (He
rated moles and bluebottle flies
the lowest.) This obsession with
edible adventure occasionally
crossed over into the grotesque:
At a party outside Oxford in
which the desiccated heart of
French King Louis XIV was
being passed around, Buckland
either intentionally or accidentally mistook the relic for a novel
hors d’oeuvre and ate it, grievDavid P. Steensma, MD, is
senior physician at the Danaously offending his host.
Farber Cancer Institute and
While the majority of marassociate professor of medicine
row eaten across the globe today
at Harvard Medical School in
comes from cows, this has not
Boston, Massachusetts.
always been the case. There is
anthropologic evidence that early
humans used crude stone tools to break into wild animal bones
and suck out the marrow. For a long time, humans were far
from apex predators and could only have a go at the corpse of a
downed animal after the lions and hyenas were done with it.
The use of stone tools to crack open marrow and get at a food
source that no other creature could access ensured the survival of
our ancestors, while the fatty marrow fueled their brain development. There is far less anthropologic evidence that our ancestors
ate the marrow of one another, and perhaps that’s a good thing,
because infectious prions such as the ones that transmit kuru can
be found in marrow.
For many years I’ve been keeping back a story, looking for
just the right forum in which to share it, and this seems as good a
time as any, as well as a fitting last word.
I once saw an older patient in consultation for anemia. She
had worked on the home front during World War II at the Hormel factory in Austin, Minnesota, where Spam is made. When
I examined her, I noticed that she had only four fingers on one
hand. Where had the other one gone? She told me she’d lost it in
a grinder at the factory during the war. I asked her if the manager
had at least stopped the factory line to retrieve it. She shook her
head, offering only a short explanation, “We had quotas.” On a
later visit, she confessed that for years she had nightmares about
some unfortunate 19-year-old GI opening up his C-ration meat
tin after a long day spent storming Monte Cassino, only to find
her digit and its marrow inside.
David P. Steensma, MD
The content of the Editor’s Corner is
the opinion of the author and does
not represent the official position of
the American Society of Hematology
unless so stated.
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