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Ox-Marrow on Toast

Ox marrow on toast is a dish of boiled marrow served on toasted bread with parsley, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Ox-Marrow on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the marrow

  1. Remove the marrow from the bones, keeping it as large as possible.

  2. Place the marrow in a saucepan of well-salted boiling water for 1 minute, then drain.

Bake and serve

  1. Put the marrow on pieces of toasted bread.

  2. Place the toast in the oven and cook for about 5 minutes.

  3. Sprinkle with chopped parsley, salt, and pepper, and serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Marrow
Melts into the toast when heated, giving a rich, fatty, savoury texture.
Bread
Provides a crisp base that holds the warm marrow without going soggy.

The step that matters

Blanching the marrow for 1 minute. Brief boiling in well-salted water firms the marrow so it can be lifted and placed whole on the toast. Boiling too long would let it melt away and lose its shape.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, bread):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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