Stewed Mussels
Open the mussels, and to one quart of meat allow: two tablespoons of butter; one tablespoon of flour; six whole peppercorns; one-half cup of cream; two eggs (yolks only); salt and pepper to taste. Stew the mussels five minutes in their own liquor, and then add the flour rubbed well into the butter, and the peppercorns. Stew ten minutes, and pour in the heated cream. Set back on the range, and stir in the yolks of the eggs, which will have been thinned with a tablespoon of water or milk. Season with salt and pepper and serve.
T CRABS (Hard Shell) boil cràbs, put them head first into hot water. After five minutes add one tablespoon of salt and boil for thirty minutes. When cold, remove the shells, the stomach, which is just under the head, the gills, and the intestine. Take out the meat carefully. The common expression "crab flakes" simply means the meat from boiled hard shell crabs, which has been removed in flakes with a fork. It may also be found among the canned articles and comes in several good brands, accompanied by crab shells into which the prepared flakes are often placed for serving.
A plain cream-and-yolk stew of the sort that appears in every turn-of-the-century American fish chapter. Two things need attention: the cooking time and the egg liaison. Note also that the text as printed runs straight into a separate entry on boiling hard-shell crabs, which is not part of this recipe.
- The hinge: never let the yolks boilOnce the thinned yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will curdle into threads. "Set back on the range" means moving the pan to the cool edge of a coal range; on a modern hob, take it off the heat entirely and stir the yolks in off-flame, returning it only briefly over the lowest setting.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longMussel meat firms in about two minutes and turns to rubber well before the recipe's five-plus-ten. Cook the mussels only until just set, lift them out, build the sauce in the liquor for the full time to cook out the flour, then return the meat at the very end to warm through.
- Opening the musselsMussels can be shucked raw or steamed briefly in a covered pan. Steaming is easier and gives you the liquor; discard any that were gaping and would not close before cooking, and any that stay shut after. Pull off the beards and rinse away grit — the liquor is worth straining through muslin.
- A quart of meatThat is somewhere upwards of 5 lb of mussels in the shell, depending on how well filled they are, and it makes a substantial dish for four. The volume of liquor they release varies enormously with the shellfish, so add cream to reach the consistency you want rather than trusting the half cup exactly.
- Butter and flourTwo tablespoons of butter rubbed into one of flour is essentially a beurre manie, though butter-heavy against the usual equal parts, and worked in cold rather than cooked first. Add it in small pinches to the simmering liquor and let it bubble a couple of minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Whole peppercornsSix whole peppercorns are for perfume rather than heat, and the recipe gives no instruction to remove them. Tie them in a scrap of muslin if you would rather not hunt for them.
- Salt at the endMussel liquor is already saline and reduces as the stew cooks. Season only after the cream and yolks are in.
- The crab paragraphThe lines beginning "To boil crabs" belong to a separate entry that has run together in the printing. The advice there — thirty minutes for hard-shell crabs — is much longer than current practice as well.
Mussels sat low in the American shellfish hierarchy at the time the Butterick book was compiled: oysters and clams were the prestige bivalves, mussels the cheap coastal ones, more eaten in France and along immigrant waterfronts than in respectable dining rooms. The treatment here is a genteel one, finishing a humble shellfish with cream and an egg-yolk liaison in the manner of a French velouté, which is how many American cookbooks of the period made a modest ingredient acceptable to a middle-class table. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued household manuals aimed at exactly that reader — a woman managing a kitchen herself or with one servant — which explains the brisk, assumption-heavy prose and the untroubled instruction to "set back on the range," a direction that only makes sense with a coal or wood stove and its graduated heat.