Important: Safety Warning
This page gives advice for salvaging or disguising food that has begun to spoil. Spoiled food can carry dangerous bacteria and toxins that no washing, soaking, or seasoning removes; it should be discarded.
In addition, this page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Mullet
See Red and Grey.
MUSHROOMS require a volume to themselves. It is not possible here to give them more than a few lines. Their varieties are infinite; and there is yearly an immense waste of them, through our inability to discern between the edible and the poisonous ones. Professor Schiff has demonstrated that the non-edible mushrooms have a common poison, muscarina, and that its effects are counteracted either by atropine or daturine. Italian apothecaries now keep these alkaloids in the rural districts where the consumption of the non-edible fungi is apt to occur. Those mushrooms which are edible are full of nourishment and Mussels of the most exquisite flavour. I have seen people with their eyes shut eat mushrooms-a variety which the French call ceps and heard them declare that they were eating flesh. Of the enormous value of the mushroom in sauces and ragouts the reader has seen ample proof in the course of these pages. For the treatment of mushrooms by themselves there are two leading receipts.
Stewed Mushrooms. These are the Mushrooms à l'olivier invented by La Varenne, and since developed into the Duxelles. See Duxelles; and see also Truffes à l'Italienne, which is but another form of the same receipt with the substitution of truffles for mushrooms.
Grilled Mushrooms. - Peppered, salted, buttered and grilled. When, in addition to this, they are served with a sauce of oil or melted butter, to which parsley, young onions and garlic (all chopped) are added, together with the juice of a lemon, they are called Mushrooms à la Bordelaise.
MUSSELS are the oysters of the poor, said Grimod de la Reynière, and they ought to be favoured also by the rich, for there is scarcely a shell-fish which surpasses them in flavour. Especially in these days, when oysters are dear, mussels might occasionally take their place in sauces and stews. The French are wise, for they still hold the mussel in regard-it is one of the chief attractions of that noble ragout, the Normandy Matelote. In England-be it said with shame-the mussel is chiefly used for bait; it is rarely to be seen at any good English table-it is only in houses where the French style of cookery reigns that it is to be had. People are afraid of mussels because once or twice they have proved to be hurtful. So have mushrooms; so have melons: but still mushrooms and melons are eaten. Mussel-poisoning must be extremely rare-or we should know more about it. Our science is not so Mustard backward that if, among the myriads of mussels which the French consume, the cases of poisoning were numerous, we should not be able to detect the cause. If care is taken not to eat the mussels in those months which have no letter R in their names there is little danger.
Mussel Sauce.-Proceed as for oyster sauce. Let there be no lack of mussels, and remove the hard parts.
Two working recipes sit inside this dictionary entry: grilled mushrooms (plain, or dressed as à la Bordelaise) and a mussel sauce built on the pattern of oyster sauce. The surrounding advice on identifying fungi and on the safe months for shellfish is period opinion and should be ignored.
- Ignore the mushroom safety advice entirelyThere is no single "common poison" shared by inedible fungi, and neither atropine nor daturine is a general antidote — Amanita phalloides poisoning, the one that kills, is caused by amatoxins and is untouched by either. Buy cultivated mushrooms, or work from a current field guide and a knowledgeable identifier.
- The R-months rule is not protectionParalytic and diarrhetic shellfish toxins follow algal blooms, not the calendar, and cooking does not destroy them. Modern commercial mussels come from monitored, purged waters; that, not the month, is what makes them safe.
- Grilling means high, direct heat"Grilled" here is what a modern kitchen does under a broiler or on a ridged pan. Set caps gill-side up so the butter pools in them, and give them 4-6 minutes at high heat until the juices collect and darken.
- CepsThe variety the author says tastes of flesh is Boletus edulis — porcini. Fresh ones are seasonal and expensive; dried porcini soaked in warm water, with the strained soaking liquid used in the sauce, gets much of the same savour.
- Sauce à la Bordelaise, as given hereNot the red-wine-and-marrow sauce of that name in later French cooking. This one is a dressing: warm oil or melted butter with chopped parsley, spring onions and garlic, sharpened with lemon juice, spooned over the grilled caps. Add the garlic off the heat so it stays raw and bright.
- Duxelles, for the stewed versionThe recipe is deferred to another entry. It means mushrooms chopped very fine with shallot and cooked in butter until all their water has gone and the mass is dry and dark — the point of the dish, and the step people cut short.
- "Remove the hard parts"The beard, or byssus, the fibrous tuft the mussel anchors itself with. Pull it out after the shells open. Discard any mussel that stays shut after steaming and any that was already gaping before cooking.
- Mussel sauce in practiceSteam the cleaned mussels in a splash of water or white wine until they open, shell them, strain the liquor through muslin to catch grit, and use that liquor in place of oyster liquor in a butter-and-flour or cream sauce. Return the mussels at the very end and only warm them through — a minute or two — as they toughen quickly. The recipe gives no quantities; roughly a quart of mussels in the shell should make enough sauce for a small dinner.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) came out of Kettner's restaurant in Soho and is generally attributed to the journalist E. S. Dallas; it is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary, which is why a mullet cross-reference, an essay on fungi, a defence of mussels and a one-line sauce all share a page. The defence was needed. Mussels were abundant and cheap on English coasts but were largely dug for bait, and the book's complaint that they appear only in houses "where the French style of cookery reigns" is accurate for the period he above above all the Normandy matelote. The quoted line that mussels are "the oysters of the poor" is credited here to Grimod de la Reynière, the early nineteenth-century gastronomic writer. The confident talk of muscarine and atropine reflects the 1870s enthusiasm for the new alkaloid chemistry, which had isolated real compounds but had not yet sorted out which mushroom killed by which mechanism.