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MUSSELS (a la Poulette)
Prepare the mussels according to the directions given for MUSSELS, BOILED. Strain the liquor, beard the mussels and dip them in plenty of hot water, then put them on a soft cloth to drain. Make a sauce as follows. Blend together an ounce of butter with an equal quantity of flour, and stir it over a slow fire for a minute or two, then moisten with the strained liquor, and add two dessert-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, previously scalded. Take the pan off the fire, and stir in the beaten yolks of two eggs and another piece of butter, about half an ounce. Put the mussels on a dish in their shells, detached, and pour the sauce over.
A classic velouté-style liaison over shellfish, written for a cook who already knows how to open mussels. The whole dish turns on the last thirty seconds.
- The hinge: never reheat after the yolksOnce the beaten yolks and finishing butter go in, the pan must stay off direct heat. Anything approaching a simmer will scramble the yolks and break the sauce into grains; if it needs warming, set the pan over water that is hot but not boiling and stir constantly.
- Strain the liquor twiceMussel liquor carries sand no matter how well the shells were scrubbed. Pour it through a fine sieve lined with muslin, and leave the last spoonful of grit behind in the pan rather than chasing it.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessert spoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly 2 teaspoons. Two of them is about 4 teaspoons of chopped parsley, which is generous but correct for this sauce.
- Scalding the parsleyThirty seconds in boiling water then a squeeze dry sets the colour and takes the raw edge off. It matters here because the parsley gets only a moment in the sauce before the pan comes off the fire.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark fibrous byssus the mussel uses to anchor itself. Pull it off after cooking, when it comes away easily; the brief dip in hot water in the original is presumably to rinse off any loosened grit rather than to cook them further, though the recipe does not say.
- Buying and discardingBuy mussels alive, with shells closed or closing when tapped, and cook them the day you get them. Discard any that stay shut after boiling.
- Reheating the musselsMussels toughen fast on a second cooking. Have the dish warmed, the shells arranged and the sauce finished before the mussels sit for more than a minute or two.
À la poulette is one of the standing formulas of nineteenth-century French cookery: a white sauce made on the cooking liquor of whatever is being served, finished off the heat with egg yolks, butter, lemon and parsley. The name is generally traced to poulet, on the grounds that the sauce was first built on chicken cooking liquor, though the treatment attached itself just as firmly to mussels, sweetbreads, tripe and calf's feet. Cassell's, compiled for English households in the late Victorian decades, reproduces the French method almost unchanged, which is itself telling: mussels were cheap coastal food in Britain, said to have been sold by the quart from barrows. The cross-referencing here to MUSSELS, BOILED is typical of the dictionary format, where a single base preparation serves a number of later entries.