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Mussels, Ketchup Of
When carefully prepared and cooked, mussels make a variety of wholesome and agreeable dishes. The shells must be first cleansed by repeated washing and brushing, and afterwards be well rinsed in a colander until the drippings are quite clear. Put them into a large iron saucepan with only the water that hangs upon the shells. Cover closely, and shake the mussels while heating to expedite their opening. As soon as this is accomplished (they will be hard and indigestible if kept over the fire too long), turn them into a clean earthen pan, beard them, and remove the weed, crab, and black part. Take a pint and a half of carefully-picked mussels, and pound them in a mortar, then boil with a pint of made wine or cider, and a full pint of the juice that flowed from the mussels when boiled, a sprinkling of cayenne, and a tea-spoonful of powdered mace. When sufficiently boiled and skimmed, strain through a hair sieve. Bottle when cold, and see that the bottles are sealed as well as corked.
This is a bottled shellfish sauce meant to be kept in the larder, and that is precisely where it fails: nothing in the method makes it safe for storage. The notes below explain the specific problems and decode the Victorian vocabulary.
- Why it cannot be bottledPounded mussels and their cooking liquor form a low-acid, protein-rich, oxygen-poor medium once corked and sealed — the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum, which produces toxin without any smell or off flavour to warn you. The recipe gives no measured acidity, no salt level, no processing temperature and no hold time, so there is no way to judge it against modern preserving standards. A current, tested recipe should be used for anything shelf-stable.
- The "made wine" is not a preservative here"Made wine" means a home-made country wine — gooseberry, elderberry, rhubarb — of unknown and usually low acidity, and cider is no more reliable. Neither one, diluted by an equal volume of mussel liquor, brings the sauce anywhere near the pH that inhibits bacterial growth.
- Biotoxins in the mussels themselvesMussels concentrate algal toxins that cause paralytic and diarrhetic shellfish poisoning. These are heat-stable: boiling, pounding and straining do not destroy them, and the concentrated liquor here carries whatever the shellfish held. Commercially harvested mussels come from monitored waters; wild-gathered ones do not.
- "Beard them, and remove the weed, crab, and black part"The beard is the byssus, the tuft of fibres the mussel anchors itself with. The "weed" is trapped algae, the "crab" a small pea crab that lives commensally inside the shell, and the "black part" the digestive gland. Recipes of this period routinely direct that all of it be taken out; this one opens by insisting that mussels are wholesome only when "carefully prepared," but it does not say why these parts in particular were rejected.
- Old measuresA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz rather than 16, so "a pint and a half of carefully-picked mussels" is roughly 30 fl oz of shelled meat by volume — a very large quantity of shellfish, several pounds in the shell. The recipe gives no weight, only volume of picked meat.
- The one sound instruction"They will be hard and indigestible if kept over the fire too long" is entirely correct and still worth remembering for any mussel dish. The shells open in a few minutes over high heat, and every extra minute after that shrinks and toughens the meat.
- A hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, used because it was fine, cheap and did not react with acid or salt. A fine nylon sieve or muslin does the same job.
Victorian larders ran on ketchups, and almost none of them were tomato: bottlers of the period put up mushroom, walnut, oyster, cockle and mussel ketchup as concentrated savoury seasonings for soups, sauces and made dishes. The word itself is generally traced to the Hokkien kê-tsiap, a fermented fish or shellfish brine encountered by European traders in Southeast Asia, which explains why a pounded, spiced, bottled shellfish liquor sits so naturally under the name. Mussels were regarded with some suspicion — hence the elaborate washing, the bearding, and the removal of the "black part" — while the mace and cayenne give the bottle its warmth and depth of flavour. That the book warns about cleanliness and sealing but offers no acid measurement or heat processing is a fair picture of nineteenth-century preserving: careful, methodical, and working without any knowledge of the organism that made such bottles dangerous.