I truly meant to get to preparing this dish some time ago, the recipe coming from Fergus Henderson, Nose to Tail Eating. This D-Day evening, however, Operation Overlord was launched, and while channeling Ike and Patton, I prepared what Anthony Bourdain has called his death row meal (what he’d want before the cyanide was administered). I roasted bone marrow bones in the oven. My recipe deviated slightly, as should all recipes, from Henderson’s, the influence coming from what I had for local ingredients. Instead of veal bones, I used beef bones. The bones were larger than veal, so I roasted them in the oven on 350 degrees for the first 15 minutes. Then I cranked it up to about 45 and let them go for another 20 minutes. Henderson says to roast the smaller veal bones for about 20 minutes, but encouraged getting the outside marrow nice and crispy with the higher heat.

Also: Fergus Henderson’s bone marrow recipe necessitates a parsley salad, but he doesn’t specify to a moron such as myself as to what the lemon juice is for. Like Patton routing Rommel in North Afrika, though, I simply took action, and mixed the lemon juice with the olive oil, and tossed it with the parsley salad. The ingredients for the salad: thick leaf parsley (I used Italia parsley), two shallots (I used onion), juice from a whole lemon, pickled capers (found some imported from Spain), olive oil, and course salt.

Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, onions over shallots all the time: at $4+/gallon, these are lean times we’re living in, folks. The bone marrow bones were from North Dakota Branded Beef, a butcher/rancher family who raises their own steroid-free cattle some 10 miles east of Bismarck, selling the delicious flesh and tid bits in his butcher shop. I also bought a take-n-bake loaf of French bread, baked it as instructed, removed it from the oven, cut it diagonally (for more surface area than a straight perpendicular cut), and then put it back into the oven and toasted it. This turned out superb: spread marrow on toast, garnish with parsley salad, and enjoy with cold beer.