I’d like to take a second to wish my mother a speedy recovery from her cancer surgery.  You’re a trooper Mom, and we love you.

This recipe started off as many excellent recipes do: with a spoonful of duck fat and four pounds of thinly sliced onions cooking together.  Mr. Henderson instructs us to shoot for softened, lightly caramelized onions, which can take up to an hour to achieve.

When I was happy with the amount of browning on the onions, in went a bottle of good Normandy cider and a little chicken stock. The heat was raised until a slight simmer was going. The onions needed to cook down just a bit more.

As the onions cooked, I turned my attention to the marrowbones.  I cranked the heat on the oven and placed the marrowbones inside to roast.

I’ve been asked many times about roasting bone marrow from people that want to try making some of Mr. Henderson’s recipes at home.  My advice to them is always the same: Oven at 450, marrowbones on a baking sheet, leave them alone for 15 minutes, then check to see if the tops have crusted over.  If you undercook them you’ll end up with semi-solid marrow that won’t spread over toast easily.  You don’t want to let them go too long though because the marrow will happily melt completely leaving you with a tasty but hard to deal with puddle of fat.  And that’s not good eats.

Quickly I started slicing into the loaf of French bread I bought to make toast. A sprinkling of olive oil was added to each slice and I slid them into the oven alongside the marrowbones.

Once the tops of the marrowbones had properly crusted I removed them and the toast from the oven.  The delicious and gooey marrow was spread thickly on the slices of toast with a healthy dash of salt.

To assemble the dish I poured a healthy amount of the onion soup into a deep bowl, placed one of the marrow-adorned slices of toast on top of the soup and, to finish it off, I dropped a handful of chopped parsley “dump-truck style” all over everything.

I’m a big fan of onion soup in general, and this is a fine, fine specimen of the onion soup genus. The duck fat and marrow added the rich, luscious flavor and mouth-feel that one would come to expect from onion soup, while the cider brought lots of nuanced flavors and a slight amount of extra sweetness.  I can’t wait to make this again, it’s an easy and delicious way to present bone marrow to people who might be afraid of it on its own.