Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mussels, Stewed
Mussels, Stewed
Take some carefully-prepared mussels, put them into a saucepan with as much of their liquor, strained and previously boiled with a blade of mace, as will be required to cover them. Let them stew gently, and just before boiling add a thickening of butter and flour blended together. Serve on hot toast. Time, eight to ten minutes to stew.
A plain butter-and-flour stew of mussels in their own liquor, of the kind that once counted as a light supper dish. The method is sound; the timing is not.
- Eight to ten minutes is far too longEight to ten minutes is longer than the meats need — The mussels here have plainly been opened and shelled already, and their liquor strained and boiled with the mace before they go into the pan; eight to ten minutes of further stewing will shrink them and toughen them. Open them in a covered pan (two to four minutes, until the shells gape), lift the meats out, then finish the sauce separately and return the mussels only to warm through.
- "Carefully-prepared" is doing real workThe phrase presumably covers scrubbing, debearding and inspection. Buy mussels live, discard any that are cracked or that stay open when tapped, and discard any that refuse to open after cooking. The beard (byssus threads) pulls out with a firm tug toward the hinge.
- Their liquorThe liquid is what the mussels release as they open, not water added to the pan. Strain it through muslin to catch grit and sand, which is the usual fault in this dish. Reduce it if it tastes thin.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, roughly the size of a fingernail; about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in, added at the end so it does not turn dusty. Simmer the strained liquor with it for a few minutes, then remove.
- Thickening of butter and flour blended togetherThis is beurre manié — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the hot liquid in small pieces. Allow about 15 g each per 250 ml of liquor for a sauce that coats. It must simmer a minute or two after the last of it goes in or the flour tastes raw.
- SaltMussel liquor is already salty and reducing it concentrates that. Season only after the sauce is thickened, and taste before adding anything.
- Yield and servingA kilo of mussels in the shell gives roughly 250 g of meat, enough for two on toast as a first course. Use a sturdy bread that will not collapse, and pour the sauce over at the table.
Mussels were among the cheapest of British shellfish for most of the nineteenth century, gathered from tidal beds around the coast and hawked in city streets, which is why the recipe treats them as an everyday item rather than a delicacy. The insistence on "carefully-prepared" mussels appears to reflect a genuine period anxiety: mussel poisoning was reported in Victorian medical writing, and cookery writers of the era are often said to have warned readers to reject any shellfish taken from foul water or found already open. Serving a rich shellfish stew spooned over toast belongs to the same family as scalloped oysters and buttered crab — the toast is the plate, absorbing a sauce that would otherwise want a spoon. Mace, then far commoner in English kitchens than it is now, was the standard aromatic for pale fish and shellfish sauces, valued because it perfumed without colouring.