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Mussels Soup (Wash mussels let lie in fresh)
Wash mussels, let lie in fresh water to discharge any sand, scrub shells and pull off hanging tendrils, whiskers or beard. Prepare a sauce by gently frying a minced onion, a chopped green pepper and a little minced parsley in 1 tablespoon oil or butter until soft and golden; season with 2 cloves, a few gratings of nutmeg and a teaspoon of lemon juice. Put mussels into a kettle, add 2 cups boiling water to sauce and pour it over them. Cover kettle closely, let mussels steam 20 minutes and take from heat. Take out mussels and remove meats from shells. Strain broth, thicken with cornstarch and simmer 5 minutes. Add mussels meats, simmer 5 minutes more, then add 1 cup white wine, or not, and serve, poured over little cubes of buttered toast and minced hard-cooked egg.
The deeper the pearly black color and the sharper the edge of the shell the younger, tastier and tenderer your mussels are. Oldsters, tough as stewed shoe leather, show their age in rough worn shell edges, from being knocked about by life, and by their dull slate or bluish color.
A steamed-mussel soup from a camp-cooking book, written when mussels were treated like clams and cooked far longer than we now would. The quantities are loose, so read it as a method rather than a formula.
- Cut the steaming timeTwenty minutes covered will leave the meats shrunken and rubbery. Mussels open in 4 to 6 minutes over high heat; pull the pot off as soon as most shells gape and discard any that stay shut.
- QuantityNo weight is given. Two quarts of mussels in the shell, roughly 3 lb, yields about 1 1/2 cups of picked meat and enough liquor to make four bowls with the added water.
- Sorting before you cookModern practice reverses the old rule about soaking: rinse and scrub under running water, debeard, and do not leave them sitting in fresh water for long, which kills them. Discard any that are cracked, or that gape and will not close when tapped.
- Grit in the brothStrain the broth through a fine sieve lined with damp cloth rather than a colander. Wild mussels shed sand into the liquor, and it settles at the bottom of the kettle where a coarse strainer will not catch it.
- KettleHere simply a lidded pot, campfire or stove. Anything wide enough to hold the mussels in a shallow layer, about 6 quarts, works better than a tall narrow one.
- ThickeningNo amount is specified. About 1 tablespoon cornstarch slaked in cold water per 2 cups of strained broth gives a light body; more turns it gluey. Simmer the starch through before the meats go back in, then keep the second simmer brief so they do not toughen further.
- The wineA cup of raw white wine stirred in at the end tastes sharp. Either add it to the steaming liquid at the start, or simmer it a minute or two after adding to take the raw edge off; a brief simmer will not drive off all the alcohol.
- Cloves and nutmegThe two whole cloves will come out when the broth is strained; grate the nutmeg lightly, a few strokes only. Cloves and nutmeg were common seasonings for fish and shellfish in older cookery, and read as strong to a modern palate.
- ServingToast the bread cubes and mince the egg while the mussels steam, and put them in the bowls first so the hot soup goes over them. Serves four as a first course, two as a meal.
Mussels sat low in the American shellfish hierarchy for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: abundant on both coasts, cheap or free to anyone with a bucket, and largely overshadowed by oysters and clams. That may be part of why they turn up in outdoor and camp cookery, where the point was to make a meal from what the shore provided. The closing note on shell color and edge is coastal folk knowledge rather than biology, though older mussels do tend to have worn, eroded shell margins from years of wave action and fouling. The finish of buttered toast cubes and minced hard-cooked egg was a familiar garnish for fish soups in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery.