When the Singaporean food stall proprietor who'd just served me a plate of bones first offered the straw, I refused. I didn't want to take any shortcuts as I worked the tastiest bits of marrow out from the skeletal hollows.
But a couple of minutes into my repast, my face smeared with the viscous broth the bones had come in, I couldn't face the thought of leaving some of this food unexploited. So I took the proffered straw, inserted it down into a bone cavity and inhaled.
It tasted like the first bite of an excellent steak, only more so. Unlike biting into a rib-eye, when that initial sensation gives way to something less exultant and chewier, the marrow lingered on the tongue. I felt as if I was mainlining glutamate, the substance responsible for umami.
These bones had been cooked for hours in a fluorescent red amalgam of tomato and chili. Sup tulang, as this dish is called in Singapore, is Malay for "bone soup." I ate it at Deen Tulang Specialist, one of a handful of stalls specializing in the dish in the Golden Mile Food Centre, one of many food courts, known as hawker centers, in Singapore.
Even as I eagerly gobbled at the bones in front of me, I turned a question over in my head: Just what was it that made the bones so good?
Humans have been eating marrow for as long as we've been around. Indeed, some paleoanthropologists argue that eating marrow is part of what made us become human.
This school of thought is based largely on bones and stone tools from about 2 million years ago found in the Olduvai gorge, in present-day Tanzania. Fossils found there suggest that early humans scavenged carcasses already picked apart by other carnivores, and, using tools, broke open the bones and sucked out the marrow. Because marrow is very fatty, it is calorically dense, so the effort required to break open the bones was worth it.
In the West, marrow somehow evolved into an aristocratic food. In Offal: A Global History, Nina Edwards mentions a recipe used at Henry V's court "involving a beef marrow-stuffed steak rolled up like a pancake and sweetened with honey." Queen Victoria, she says, ate roasted bone marrow on a daily basis. In more recent times, Fergus Henderson, a chef in London who was in the forefront of "nose-to-tail" eating, popularized a recipe of roast beef bone marrow with parsley, served with toast.
These sorts of preparations are delicious, but they treat marrow as a delicate, rare thing, like caviar or foie gras. Yet marrow, today as it was in prehistoric times, is plentiful.
The sup tulang vendors in Singapore sell it by the bone — it works out to just over a U.S. dollar for each one. It's not a pricey food by Singaporean standards, though it is a delicacy.
A similar soup by the same name can be found in Malaysia, but the preparation I had at Deen's is uniquely Singaporean. It is a specialty of the mamak, or Indian Muslim, community in Singapore, who make up a small percentage of the population. Aside from the hawker center where I had it, there are a handful of other food stalls and restaurants in the city-state that serve it.
Compared with the marrow I'd eaten before, which was lightly spiced, the marrow in the tulangsoup tasted more intense — the fattiness of the marrow rounded out the chili, tomato, fennel, cumin and ginger.Marrow, because it is less widely consumed than flesh these days, hasn't been thoroughly studied by flavor scientists. There is one guy, however, who has his Ph.D. in bone marrow: Belayet Choudhury. His 2008 dissertation, "Volatile and non-volatile components of beef marrow bone stocks," is great reading.
Part of marrow's flavor, Choudhury explains, comes from the Maillard reaction in which sugars react with amino acids (this is the same thing that causes a nice crust to develop on steaks cooked over high heat).
Bone marrow, he writes, is almost 80 percent fat and only about 2.6 percent protein, with the rest being moisture. There are at least 12 different fatty acids present and about 20 amino acids.
When bone marrow is cooked, the large number of acids create even larger numbers of volatile compounds through a series of chemical reactions (the Maillard reaction and oxidation being the most important ones). The newly created volatile compounds interact with the nonvolatiles to bring about the marrow's rich taste.
Choudhury set out to find what compounds endow marrow not just with its pronounced umami but also with its "mouthfulness and taste continuity." He performed a series of experiments tosingle out exactly what was in the stock, finding a number of volatile compounds that hadn't previously been identified that, he wrote, provide "characteristic aroma and overall flavor."
Guy Crosby, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard and the science editor of America's Test Kitchen, says that the many nucleotides present in bone marrow amplify the umami taste of glutamate by as much as 20 to 30 times.Crosby reminded me that the function of bone marrow is to produce red blood cells. Because it is, in effect, a factory for the creation of cells, Crosby says, bone marrow is like an egg: "a perfect food. It's got everything in it needed to create and sustain life."
And it's true: Marrow tastes wholesome, in a way that other similarly rich foods, like butter, don't. It has some of everything you need. Just as cold, pure water from a mountain spring quenches thirst, this soup, the marrow tempered with spice and made resilient by tomato, seems to me as close as any substance can be to the tangible opposite of hunger.
I liked grappling with the bones, not immune to imagined kinship with cavemen who hunted beasts and gnawed on their prey. But my variety of carnivorous experience is distant from theirs. The fact is, once I gave in and sucked at the marrow through a straw, the implement children use to drink, I got at more of it. It was a reminder that I'm not that much less powerless than a toddler.
我(原文作者，下同)这辈子吃过的最好吃的肉类食物却是用吸管吸着吃的。
那名新加坡摊主第一次给我一碟带吸管的骨头的时候，我拒绝了。我觉得既然是享用最美味的骨髓，就不应该投机取巧。
但是吃了几十分钟后，我的脸上糊满了骨头上渗出的黏黏的肉汤，因为我根本不舍得浪费一点如此美味的食物。所以，我决定接过老板提供的吸管，插进深深的骨洞，大口大口的吮吸着里面的精华。
这东西就像一块上好牛排咬上去的第一口，而且只会比这更美好。和肋眼肉的口感不同，第一口下去的感觉渐渐变成了更让人欢快，更耐嚼的感觉，骨髓缠绕在舌头上久久不愿离去。我觉得自己好像沉溺于谷氨酸钠中不能自拔。
混着番茄和辣椒的混合物熬煮了好几个小时，这些骨头才有如此风味。这道菜在新加坡叫Tulang汤，音同土朗，是马来语“骨头汤”的意思。我吃的小摊是当地少数几家专门卖土朗汤的摊位之一。
在我狼吞虎咽面前的这堆骨头的时候，有个问题浮现在我脑海中：是什么让骨髓这么好吃?
实际上，人类吃骨髓的历史已经有很久了，有些古人类学者甚至认为，吃骨髓是从人从猿发展到人的原因之一。
这派观点是基于在奥杜威峡谷(今天的坦桑尼亚)发现的约200万年以前的骨头和骨质工具。通过研究该地区发现的化石，显示早期人类已经会从其它食肉动物吃剩下的野兽残骸中收集骨头，并用工具砸开骨头吸吮骨髓。因为骨髓的油脂含量极高，热量密度高，所以即便砸骨头很费力，也是值得的。
在西方国家，骨髓逐渐演化成贵族才能享用的食物。作家Nina Edwards在《内脏：一部全球历史》这本书中提到了亨利五世宫廷中一道用牛骨髓填满的牛排一块块重叠在一起，再浇上蜜汁的一道凶残无比的大菜。她在书中写道“维多利亚女皇每天都要享用烧烤骨髓。” 再往后，坚持“从牛鼻吃到牛尾”的伦敦厨子Fergus Henderson想出了一种做法并普及开来：用牛骨髓和欧芹一起烧烤。
在过去骨髓和鱼子酱、鹅肝酱一样稀有，所以人们都把骨髓当做一道珍馐。但今天人们面对着和史前时代一样丰富的骨髓资源。
新加坡卖土朗汤的小贩一根骨棒售价不过1美元多一点，虽然按照新加坡人的收入来看，并不是很昂贵的食物，但是大家就是很喜欢。
在马来西亚也能找到土朗汤，是印裔伊斯兰教徒的一道特色菜。和我之前吃过的土朗汤相比，这里的骨髓风味更加浓烈——骨油中混有辣椒、番茄、茴香、莳萝、姜的味道。
Belayet Choudhury是一名博士，他的研究课题就是骨髓，2008年他的博士毕业论文的题目是“牛骨髓骨中的挥发性和非挥发性成分”，相当值得一读。
根据Choudhury的解释，牛骨髓的风味很大程度上来自糖分和氨基酸在高温下的美拉德反应。
他的文章中写道，牛骨髓将近80%的成分是脂肪，只有约2.6%的蛋白质，其余是水分。骨髓中含有至少12种不同脂肪酸和20种氨基酸。
加热骨髓时，大量的酸会产生更多量的挥发性物质，挥发性物质又和非会挥发性物质起反应，结果就是骨髓厚重丰腴的味道。
Choudhury开始着手研究除了味精，骨髓让整个口腔弥漫香味和味道久久不去的原因，在进行了一系列研究后，他发现了许多此前没有鉴定出来的挥发性物质，在研究论文中他说就是这些新发现的挥发性物质让骨髓具有了特有的香味，骨髓的大体风味也是得益于此。
哈弗大学副教授，同时也是美国Test Kitchen的科学编辑的Guy Crosby说骨髓中的多种核苷酸能够起到增强味精风味20-30倍的作用。
Crosby让我想到了骨髓的作用：制造血红细胞。Crosby说因为骨髓是细胞的制造工厂，所以骨髓就像鸡蛋一样是完美的食物：提供了制造生命和维持生命所需的一切营养。
从骨髓的味道也可以确定一点，骨髓吃上去就让人觉得这东西应该对身体好，其它油脂丰富的食物，比如黄油，却尝不出这种感觉。骨髓里有你所需要的一切，就和深山里冰冷纯净的水瞬间能止渴的道理一样，和番茄、辣椒一起熬煮的骨髓汤味道调和，我觉得，这道菜就是饥饿的反义词。
我喜欢抱着骨头啃的感觉，虽然这看起来像茹毛饮血的洞穴人类，不过我不在乎。 |
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