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RICE, MUSSELS AND (an Algerian recipe)
Wash the mussels well; set them on the fire in a stewpan without any water, but with a close-fitting lid. Shake them up from time to time so as to bring them all in turn to the bottom. They will gradually open and give out their liquor, in which, and in the steam from it, they will cook. When they are all well opened and detach easily from the shell, turn them out into a large-holed colander placed over a vessel to catch the liquor which strains, and set aside to settle. Take the mussels out of their shells, rejecting the weed attached to their inside and any little parasitical crabs within them, and put them aside. Boil rice as if for a curry, so as to be as dry as possible when done. To this put a good lump of butter and a few table-spoonfuls of the mussel liquor, season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Put in the mussels, beat up all together, mixing without breaking them; or heap the warmed-up mussels in the centre of a dish, and surround them with the seasoned rice.
The recipe assumes you know how to steam mussels and boil rice separately; the interesting work is in the mussel liquor, which carries all the seasoning. No quantities are given, so scale by appetite.
- Quantities and yieldNothing is specified. A workable ratio is 2 lb mussels in the shell to about 1 cup (7 oz) raw long-grain rice, which serves three or four. That weight of mussels yields roughly 8 oz of shucked meat and perhaps half a cup to a cup of liquor.
- The hinge: settle and decant the liquorMussels release sand along with their juice. Let the strained liquor stand undisturbed for ten minutes and pour off the clear part, leaving the grit in the bottom of the vessel. Skipping this step is what makes the finished rice crunch.
- Salt lastMussel liquor is close to seawater. Add the butter and liquor to the rice first, taste, and only then decide whether any salt is needed at all.
- "Rice as if for a curry"Victorian instructions for curry rice generally had the grains boiled in plenty of water, drained, and then dried out before the fire or in a low oven until separate and fluffy. Any dry pilaf or absorption method gives the same result; avoid short-grain or anything starchy enough to clump.
- "The weed attached to their inside"This is the byssus, the beard. It is easier to pull away before cooking than after, though the recipe's order works too. Modern rope-grown mussels are often sold already debearded.
- The "little parasitical crabs"Pea crabs, Pinnotheres, still turn up in wild mussels. They are harmless and edible, but discarding them as instructed is reasonable.
- Steaming timeOver a high flame with the lid on, 2 lb of mussels open in four to six minutes. Pull the pan off as soon as they gape; anything much beyond that shrinks the meat to rubber. Discard any that stay firmly shut.
- ReheatingThe shucked mussels only need warming through in the buttered rice, a minute at most. If you are serving them heaped in the centre as the second option suggests, warm them in a spoonful of their own liquor rather than on direct heat.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use it sparingly; pre-ground nutmeg is flat and the dish has little else to hide behind.
Cassell's collected dishes from across the Mediterranean and the empire under national labels, and "an Algerian recipe" here reflects the late nineteenth-century British interest in French North Africa, then under colonial rule. The dish itself is less exotic than the label suggests: rice cooked dry and dressed with shellfish and their cooking liquor is a pattern found all around the western Mediterranean, from Spanish arroces to the mussel-and-rice preparations of the Maghreb coast. The instruction to boil rice "as if for a curry" is the giveaway that this is a British kitchen's frame of reference eing understood in England chiefly as the thing served alongside curry. The insistence on steaming mussels in nothing but their own juice is sound and older than the book; it is the method that concentrates rather than dilutes the flavour, and something close to it survives in modern practice.