Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Pickled Mussels
Take any quantity of cooked mussels, pick them out of their shells, remove the beards, put them into jars or wide-mouthed bottles, and sprinkle over with salt and pepper. Strain some of their liquor (that is, what comes from them when being cooked) and add to it an equal quantity of vinegar; fill up the bottles with the liquor, tie them down, let them remain for a day or so, when the mussels will be ready for use. They may be eaten hot by pouring a little of the liquor into a saucepan, with some minced parsley, pepper and salt to taste, and thickening with a little butter, well rolled in flour. Add the mussels, allow them to remain in it until thoroughly warmed through, and serve.
This is a keeping pickle for a low-acid shellfish, sealed and held at room temperature with no measured acidity. That combination is the reason it cannot be recommended today, whatever its merits on the Waldorf's cold table.
- The dilution is the problemMussel cooking liquor is watery, salty and close to neutral. Cutting vinegar with an equal volume of it drops the acidity of the finished brine to a level that is not reliably preservative, and the recipe gives no proportion of salt, no pH target and no way to check either.
- Sealed jar, no heat processSealed jar, no heat process means a cover such as bladder, parchment or cloth tied over a filled jar, though such a seal need not have been airtight. A covered, low-oxygen jar of under-acidified seafood held at room temperature is a recognised risk condition for Clostridium botulinum, and the toxin gives no reliable warning by smell or taste. The mussels are never brought to a canning temperature at any stage.
- "A day or so" is not a shelf life"A day or so" is not a shelf life — the recipe gives that period only as the time before the mussels are ready for use, and says nothing about how long the filled jars may then be kept; the risk rises with every day at ambient temperature.
- Mussels concentrate what the water holdsFilter feeders accumulate bacteria, viruses and algal biotoxins from their growing water. Domoic acid and saxitoxin are heat-stable and acid-stable, so neither the initial cooking nor the vinegar removes them. Modern practice depends on mussels from monitored, tagged commercial beds, a condition the recipe cannot supply.
- The reheating step does not fix itWarming the pickled mussels through in buttered liquor, as the second half directs, is a gentle heating to serving temperature. It is not a step that would neutralise a toxin already formed in the jar.
- Terms, for reading the pageTerms, for reading the page — The "beard" is the byssus, the tough fibrous thread the mussel anchors itself with, pulled away after cooking. "Their liquor" is the juice released in the pot, strained here because mussels shed grit and fragments of shell. "Butter, well rolled in flour" is what would later be called beurre manié: butter and flour kneaded raw, then worked into the hot liquor to thicken it.
- If you want the dishFollow a current recipe for pickled or marinated mussels, one that specifies vinegar strength and refrigerated storage with a stated keeping time.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the original Waldorf, gathers a great deal of material well beyond what the hotel actually served, and this entry reads like one of the many borrowings from British domestic cookery that fill its shellfish pages. Pickled mussels belonged to a cheap end of the trade: mussels were gathered along the coasts and estuaries of Britain and the American northeast, and pickled in vinegar as a way of stretching a glut a few days further, alongside pickled cockles, whelks and oysters. The double life the recipe describes — eaten cold from the jar, or warmed in their own liquor with parsley and a lump of floured butter — is characteristic of nineteenth-century shellfish cookery, where the pickle was as much a holding medium as a flavour.