Thrilling meat lovers to the marrow
Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore, By Jennifer McLagan, William Morrow, 257 pp., $34.95
Australian-born Jennifer McLagan, now based in Toronto, knows all about the joys of gastronomy close to the bone -- sweet and tender meat, and crisp, melting fat. From its alluring jacket photo (the most glamorous marrow bones imaginable) to its index (white veal stock, wild boar, wishbones), ''Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore" is a multi-napkin, flatware-optional ode to meat, capable of reducing even the most civilized guest to a bone-sucking early hominid.
It takes patience to work with a bone, and these are slow recipes; most are not for the weekday cook. But the results are persuasive enough to argue that ''Bones" should be the first cookbook you reach for on the weekend.
Many meat cookbooks rely on the protein itself to carry all the flavor; others demand a commitment to sauces and spices that can overwhelm both the dish and the cook. McLagan tends to balance her flavors neatly. Smoked hock with black-eyed peas is the Southern favorite, hoppin' John; here, allspice and vinegar give extra definition to what can be a monotonous, if hearty, dish. Soy-glazed chicken wings benefited from repeated applications of glaze and emerged from the oven mahogany-coated, in a fragrant cloud of anise. They required four napkins apiece.
Succulent rib lamb chops, crisply breaded with thyme and lemon, and served on a bed of leeks, delivered ecstasy. I gnawed on the bone, of course, wishing for more.
Two recipes were long on flavor and potential, though the cooking times fell short. Cornish hens were stuffed with lemons and tarragon, glazed with maple and mustard. Our hens required an hour to cook through, rather than the 45 minutes McLagan suggested. A dry rub and a glaze more or less guaranteed that spicy beef ribs would explode with taste, but we had to stretch one hour of roasting into more like 90 minutes. Both dishes were rewarding enough to make it worth having to fiddle with the timing. After testing my oven for accuracy -- nothing was wrong -- I could only conclude that McLagan's home oven runs hot, or meat cuts are different in Canada (in fact, for equal weights I got three ham hocks to McLagan's one, and six chicken wings to McLagan's nine).
All the chapters, which are arranged sensibly according to the protein, have the little anatomy chart all meat cookbooks need but often lack. They are models of clarity for all of us who have never been quite certain of what a ''loin" is, or where to find it.
There are 40 deliriously gamy pages devoted to venison, rabbit, elk, and boar. There are even desserts (which you can skip, unless you're a fan of marrow pudding). McLagan's personable prose is leavened with bone miscellanea and bone quotations. This debut volume is nearly everything a cookbook should be: wise, stylish, and delicious. With a little attention to weights and times, the next reprint could be as perfect as gnawing on a big bone.
