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Mussels, Soup Of
The basis of this soup may be either a fish or meat stock. Take half the quantity of stock required for the soup, mix with it a pint of pounded mussels, previously boiled and the beards taken off. Pound also in a mortar the hard-boiled yolks of three eggs, with a lump of butter, a little mace, cayenne, and salt; boil for thirty minutes, then strain. Add the remainder of the stock, and simmer for a few minutes longer. Put in another pint of mussels, and make hot, but do not let the soup boil. Serve with toasted sippets. If liked, the recipes for OYSTER SOUP may be followed, mussels being used instead of oysters.
A two-stage shellfish soup: half the mussels are pounded and simmered to flavour and thicken the stock, the rest go in whole at the end. The whole point of the method is that the second batch is only warmed through.
- Do not boil the finished soupMussels toughen and shrink within a minute of boiling. Once the second pint goes in, hold the pot below a simmer — 160-170F — just until they are hot, two or three minutes at most.
- Buying and quantitiesA pint of shucked, cooked mussels is roughly the yield of 2 to 2.5 lb of mussels in the shell, so about 5 lb for the two pints called for. Discard any that stay shut after steaming and any that were gaping and would not close before cooking.
- BeardsThe beard is the byssus, the tough fibrous tuft the mussel anchors itself with. Pull it away after steaming; it will not soften with cooking.
- Keep the cooking liquorSteam the mussels in a little water or white wine and save the strained liquor — it is the most flavourful part and can replace some of the stock. Strain it through muslin, as grit settles out of mussels readily.
- PoundingA mortar was the standard tool for this; a food processor does the same work in seconds. Pulse rather than puree, and pound the egg yolks with the butter separately so they emulsify into a smooth paste.
- The thirty-minute boilThis stage exists to extract flavour from the pounded mussels before straining them out, so the long cooking does no harm — the solids are discarded. Do not skip the straining or the soup will be gritty and grainy.
- MaceBlade mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg, is milder and more floral than nutmeg itself. Use about a quarter teaspoon ground, or one blade steeped and removed with the strained solids.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of toasted bread, served alongside or floated on top. Cut from a firm white loaf, crusts off, and toast dry rather than frying.
- YieldThe original gives none. Figure on about 2 quarts of finished soup, serving six to eight as a first course.
Cassell's treats mussels frankly as the cheap alternative to oysters — the closing line, offering the oyster soup method with mussels substituted, tells you exactly where they sat in the Victorian hierarchy of shellfish. British mussels were gathered from tidal beds and sold cheaply in coastal and industrial towns, at a fraction of the price of oysters, and they carried a reputation for causing illness that had less to do with the mollusc than with the polluted estuaries many were raked from; the introduction of purification tanks and relaying in clean water in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was what eventually rehabilitated them. The technique here — pounding cooked shellfish with hard-boiled egg yolk and butter to body and bind a stock — is an older way of thickening a fish soup, one often associated with the handling of other shellfish as well.