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Mussels, Sauce Of
Clean, boil, and beard the mussels as before directed (see MUSSELS, BOILED), put them with their juice into a stewpan, season with cayenne and salt, and let them heat slowly, but do not let them boil. Stir in rich melted butter or thick cream until the sauce is of the proper consistency. A dessert-spoonful of vinegar may be added. Strain the juice of the mussels through a piece of muslin.
A short sauce built on the liquor the mussels give up in cooking, meant to be served over fish or with the mussels themselves. Two things in it will mislead a modern reader: what "melted butter" meant in 1880, and how briefly shellfish can stand reheating.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian English this is the standard butter sauce, roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in butter and let down with liquid to a pouring consistency. Plain molten butter will simply separate into the mussel juice.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. The mussels are already cooked, and a second boiling shrinks them to rubber; heat them through in the sauce over a low flame for a minute or two at most.
- Strain the liquor firstThe instruction sits at the end but belongs at the beginning. Mussel juice carries grit and shell fragments, so strain it through muslin, doubled if you like, and leave the last spoonful in the pan.
- Beards and shellsThe beard is the byssus thread the mussel anchors itself with; pull it towards the hinge. Discard any mussel that stays shut after cooking, and any raw one that will not close when tapped.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons. Use a mild vinegar or lemon juice; the point is to cut the richness of the cream, not to make the sauce sharp.
- Salt with restraintMussel liquor is already sea-salted. Season at the end, after the cream has gone in.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no quantities. A quart or so of mussels in the shell will yield enough liquor and meat to dress a plain poached or fried white fish.
Cassell's belongs to a period when mussels were the cheapest shellfish on the British coast, gathered from harbour walls and rocks rather than farmed, and treated in cookery books as a poor relation of the oyster. That cheapness explains the sauce: the liquor is the valuable part, and the recipe is really a method for turning a few pence of shellfish into something that will dress a plain boiled or fried fish. The insistence on straining through muslin reflects a genuine problem with wild-gathered mussels, which sit in sand and silt; the equally firm instruction not to boil suggests that the writer, at least, was alert to the risk of toughening the shellfish. Mussels also carried a period anxiety about "mussel poisoning", much discussed in nineteenth-century medical journals and variously blamed on copper, on the beard, or on the season, which is generally traced now to algal toxins and to shellfish taken from foul water.