The Bone Marrow Obsession Has Gone Far Enough

Innovations become styles, and styles become cliches, so fast you sometimes don't notice until the cliché becomes a punchline. Think of hair metal, or to take a more recent example, bartenders with Rasputin beards. Bone marrow hasn't gotten quite there yet. But I'm done with it anyway.

Bone marrow, you say? When did this happen? Nobody has been drowning me in bone marrow anytime recently. But it's on the way. Bone marrow is the next year's bacon, and I want to cut it off on the pass. Don't get me wrong; artfully used, bone marrow is a kind of magic elixir, an infusion of depth and soul into what would otherwise be just another plate of steak or spaghetti. Even taken by itself, in its traditional vessel of cut bone, its gelatinous body and umami oomph make it ideal for spreading on dry toast. (You put some kind of pickles or jam on it to relieve all its flab.) It's one thing for marrow to have a supporting role, though, or even as with the latter case, to be a Special Guest Star – "And Roasted Bone Marrow as... the President." It's another entirely to have it billed as a co-star. Marrow has a certain intensity, but it's essentially just tasteless fat. Putting lumps of it on top of other foods is merely gross, a cheap shot, an easy out. It's the culinary equivalent of hiring a bosomy bartender, and almost as cynical.

I watched the marrow epidemic spread over the last few years. It started, as these things tend to, with its most gloriously innovative application to date: Michael White's fusilli with bone marrow and octopus at Marea. This dish was so transcendantly delicious that no less a personage than Thomas Keller pronounced it the best dish he had all year. But it wasn't the marrow that made it great, strictly speaking. White's whole career had been characterized by his uncanny ability to make dishes in which fat invisibly undergirded pasta, but with enough acid balanced with it to keep the dish from being gross. Other applications followed of varying brilliance. The best dish to be served at Meatopia, in my opinion, was Marc Forgione'stomahawk ribeye with bone marrow maitre'd butter. But so ripe were the minds of American chefs for marrow as a more exotic and intense alternative to butter that, some months later, a talented young one named James Moore served me the exact same dish at a very fine steakhouse, The Boiler House in San Antonio. Moore had no idea that he was reinventing Forgione's dish; he presented it to me, with ingenous enthusiasm, as his own creation, which it was – as far as he knew. Can there be any doubt that some other young buck had the same idea in Portland or St. Paul? It wasn't just in the realm of steak that this meaty meme has metastasized; within a few weeks of each other, two of New York's best chefs, Eric Ripert and Harold Dieterle, independently conceived of a dish consisting of uni topped with marrow.

I can see where this is going; we've been there before. I like marrow. A lot. And I don't want to see it fall into self-parody the way bacon did during the lardcore era. When it does, I'm sure I'll get blamed for it by Gabrielle Hamilton. So I want it to go on record: It says here that marrow is no longer cool. Use it as you will, chefs. But don't expect to get any meat cred for it. The secret is out, and the bones are bare for all to see.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From Food