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Lemon Juice (Half a pint of Cream)
Half a pint of Cream.
Prepare the mussels as for dressed mussels.
Melt the butter in a stewpan, add the flour, and mix them well. Pour the fish stock and the liquor from the mussels to the butter and flour; add the parsley stalks, &c. Let it boil, and skim well; then strain, and add the cream and the mussels. Re-heat without boiling, and serve.
This is the second half of a cream of mussels soup; the printed title is a stray line from the ingredient column, so the quantities for butter, flour, stock and mussels never made it onto the page. The method is a plain velouté finished with cream, and it holds up well once you supply the missing amounts.
- The missing quantitiesNothing survives here but the half pint of cream (imperial measure, 10 fl oz; a US cup is 8 fl oz). For a soup of that richness, a working proportion is about 2 quarts of mussels, 1 oz each of butter and flour, and roughly 1.5 pints of fish stock plus the strained mussel liquor. Treat these as reconstruction, not as the author's figures.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the cream goes inRe-heating without boiling is the whole instruction. Cream can curdle when boiled with the acid and salt of mussel liquor, and continued boiling toughens the mussels. Bring it just to steaming and serve.
- Strain the mussel liquorMussel cooking liquor carries sand and grit from the shells. Pour it off carefully leaving the last spoonful behind, or run it through muslin, before it goes near the roux. The recipe's later straining catches the parsley stalks, not the grit.
- Salt last, if at allMussel liquor is strongly saline and reduces further in the pan. Season only after the cream is in and you have tasted; many versions of this soup need no added salt.
- "Prepare as for dressed mussels"Presumably scrubbing and bearding, then steaming them open in a covered pan with a little wine or water; the book's own dressed mussels recipe would give the exact treatment. Modern practice is to discard any that are cracked or that stay firmly shut. Shell them and keep them covered so they do not dry out while the soup base cooks.
- Parsley stalks, &c.The "&c." is unspecified. It presumably stands for the usual stock aromatics -- a bay leaf, a blade of mace or a few peppercorns, perhaps a strip of lemon peel. Whatever it was, it is strained out before the cream goes in.
- StewpanA stewpan is simply a wide, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any heavy-bottomed 3-quart pan will do; the weight matters because a floury cream soup catches easily.
- YieldOn the proportions above the soup serves four to six as a first course. It does not reheat well a second time, for the same reason it must not boil.
Mussel soups run through British and French cookery of the period, when mussels were among the cheaper shellfish on the coast and yet, dressed with cream and a white sauce base, respectable enough for a dinner menu. The technique follows the French pattern: a blond roux slackened with fish stock, simmered and skimmed, strained, then finished with cream off the boil, which is the velouté method applied to a shellfish liquor. A later relative is the soup called billi-bi, usually associated with a Paris restaurant kitchen in the earlier twentieth century, though the attribution is not firmly documented.