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Mussels and Rice
Cleanse the shells in the usual way. Boil the mussels and remove the beards. Strain their liquor for use. Pick, wash, and soak thirteen ounces of rice, and boil as for curry. When ready, season with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and add an ounce and a half of butter, with a little of the mussel liquor and the fish, which should be all warmed together, or warm up the mussels for the centre of a dish, and place the rice round as a border. Time, fifteen to twenty-five minutes to boil rice.
A plain Victorian pilaf in all but name: boiled mussels folded into dry-boiled rice, or heaped in the middle of it. The original gives a rice weight but no mussel quantity, so the balance is left to the cook.
- Quantity of musselsThirteen ounces of raw rice is roughly two cups (370 g) and feeds four generously. For that much rice, reckon on 3–4 lb of mussels in the shell, which yields somewhere near a pound of shucked meat. The original simply does not say.
- The liquor is the seasoningStrain the cooking liquor through muslin or a coffee filter — mussels release grit even after scrubbing, and it settles in the last spoonfuls. Add it a little at a time and taste before salting, as it is already saline.
- "Boil as for curry"This means the Anglo-Indian method: a large pot of salted water, rice poured in loose, boiled uncovered until the grains are tender and separate, then drained and dried off. It is not the absorption method, and the result should be dry rather than sticky.
- Rice timingFifteen to twenty-five minutes reflects the rice available at the time. Modern basmati, soaked as instructed, is generally done in 8–12 minutes by this method; start testing early.
- Do not overcook the musselsThey are cooked the moment the shells open, two to four minutes in a covered pan. They are then only warmed through with the rice and butter. Any real simmering after that turns them to rubber.
- Beards and shellsPull the byssus threads away after cooking, as directed — it is easier then than raw. Discard any mussel whose shell stays firmly shut after cooking, and any that was gaping and would not close when tapped raw.
- Butter and spiceAn ounce and a half of butter is 3 tablespoons. The nutmeg should be grated fresh and used lightly; it is there to lift the sweetness of the shellfish, not to announce itself.
- ServingThe second presentation — mussels mounded in the centre, rice built up as a border — is a common Victorian way of composing a dish and holds up well. Chopped parsley and lemon are not in the original but are entirely in keeping.
Cassell's dictionaries were compiled for middle-class households buying at the fishmonger's slab, where mussels were among the cheapest things on it — a shellfish long associated with coastal poverty and with periodic scares about tainted beds near town sewage outfalls; nineteenth-century books are in any case unusually insistent about cleansing the shells and cooking them thoroughly. The instruction to boil the rice "as for curry" is the giveaway of the period: the dry-boiled, drained, separate-grained rice of Anglo-Indian kitchens was by then a familiar English way with rice for savoury dishes, though it coexisted with older methods that treated it as a thickener or a pudding grain. The result here sits somewhere between a pilaf and a fish moulded entrée, and the alternative service — mussels in the middle, rice piped or spooned round as a border — reflects the dinner-table conventions of the same decades, when a dish was expected to arrive composed rather than tossed together.