Panned Mussels
Wash shells with a brush in cold water.
Place in a pan over the fire until the shells open; remove the shells and add a piece of butter, salt, pepper, cayenne, and a dash of lemon juice. Thicken with a little flour and just bring to the boiling point, as mussels, like oysters, are rendered tough by too much cooking.
A very short set of directions that assumes you already know how to open mussels by heat. The title is almost certainly "Panned Mussels" — a dish cooked in the pan in its own liquor, not anything canned.
- The hinge: barely simmerThe last line is the whole point. Once the mussels are out of their shells they need only to be warmed through in the sauce — thirty seconds to a minute. Held at a boil they shrink and turn to rubber.
- "Over the fire until the shells open"Cover the pan and use high heat; the water clinging to the shells is enough steam. Four to six minutes for a couple of pounds. Discard any mussel that stays shut after the rest have opened, and any that was already gaping and does not close when tapped before cooking.
- Save the liquorThe recipe gives no liquid, because the juices released when the shells open are the sauce. Pour them off through a fine strainer or cloth to catch grit and shell chips, then return them to the pan with the butter.
- Cleaning, which the book skipsScrubbing is mentioned; debearding is not. Pull off the tough byssal threads before cooking. Rope-grown mussels sold today are nearly sand-free, so no long soaking in salted water is needed.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For 2 lb of mussels in the shell — one generous serving or two small ones — figure 2 tablespoons butter, 2 teaspoons flour, a pinch of cayenne and the juice of a quarter lemon.
- Thickening with flourStirring dry flour into hot butter and liquor at this stage will lump. Work the flour into the butter first as a paste, or cook it in the butter a moment before the strained liquor goes in.
- SaltTaste before adding any. Mussel liquor is already saline, and the original's blanket instruction to add salt may well overshoot.
- ServingPanned shellfish of this period was commonly served on buttered toast; spoon it over toast, or serve it as a first course with bread for the sauce.
Mussels sit slightly awkwardly in a book like this one. American cookery of the 1890s and 1900s treated the oyster as the prestige shellfish, while mussels were cheap, abundant on both coasts, and carried a lingering reputation for causing illness, which kept them off polite menus for decades. "Panned" is generally taken to be the older American term for cooking shellfish quickly in a pan with butter and seasoning, as opposed to frying, scalloping or stewing them in milk, and the comparison drawn here to oysters is doing double duty: it tells the cook both how to handle the shellfish and what familiar dish this is meant to resemble. The dash of cayenne and lemon is a characteristic late-Victorian finish for any bland shellfish.