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Mussel Salad
Wash the mussels and boil them until the shells open. When cooked drain them, remove the shells and put them into a hot dish. Melt one-fourth pound of butter, season with pepper, salt, lemon juice and a small quantity of Worcestershire sauce and pour it over the mussels. They should be eaten hot with some thin slices of brown bread and butter.
A hot buttered mussel dish filed under salads, which tells you how loosely that word was used in a 1900 hotel kitchen. The instructions assume you know how much to buy and how briefly to cook.
- QuantityNo amount of mussels is given. A quarter pound of butter would dress roughly 4 lb of mussels in the shell, perhaps four servings as a first course, but that is an editorial estimate, not the book's.
- One-fourth pound of butterThat is one American stick, 4 oz or 113 g. Melt it gently rather than browning it; the seasoning is meant to stay clean and sharp.
- The timing that mattersMussels are done the moment the shells gape, usually 3 to 5 minutes in a covered pot over high heat. Boiling on past that point shrinks them to rubber, and the recipe's "boil them until the shells open" should be read as a stopping instruction, not a duration.
- Buying and cleaningModern rope-grown mussels need little more than a rinse and a tug on any protruding beard. Discard any that are cracked, or that stay open when tapped before cooking, and any that refuse to open after cooking.
- Use the liquorOscar has you drain the mussels and makes no further use of the cooking liquid. A common modern approach is to steam them in a splash of wine or water and reduce that liquor into the butter, which gives the sauce more depth than lemon and Worcestershire alone.
- SeasoningMussels themselves are salty, so taste before adding the salt the recipe calls for. "A small quantity" of Worcestershire is left undefined; a teaspoon or two would keep it a background savoury note rather than the dominant flavour.
- Brown bread"Brown bread" in this period could mean either a dense wholemeal or Graham loaf or the New England kind steamed with molasses; the recipe does not say which. Any good wholemeal bread, sliced thin and buttered, does the job of mopping the pan.
The Waldorf kitchen worked mussels hard: they were cheap, abundant along the Atlantic coast, and carried none of the prestige of the oyster. Here they turn up dressed in butter and Worcestershire rather than served on the half shell. The dish sits in the salad chapter because "salad" in turn-of-the-century American cookery could mean almost any composed cold or dressed dish, and the boundary blurred often enough that a hot preparation like this one slipped through. Worcestershire sauce, commercially bottled in England from the later 1830s and a fixture of American larders by the 1890s, was the standard hotel shortcut for adding anchovy-and-tamarind savour to seafood. The insistence on thin brown bread and butter alongside is an English service convention, still the expected accompaniment to potted or buttered shellfish.