No. 1045

Mussels, How to Prepare

Moules, pour Preparer

Obtain four quarts of medium sized mussels; tear off the grass, scrape them well, and wash them several times, changing the water constantly. Put them when clean into a saucepan with half a pint of water or white wine, a few springs of parsley, thyme, and bay leaf; set the saucepan over a brisk fire, cover it well, and open the mussels by tossing them frequently, then take them out with a skimmer to transfer them into another saucepan. Strain the broth, leaving all sediment at the bottom, pouring it off gently not to disturb the sand; take out all the empty shells, cut off the foot (the black appendage) from the mussels with a pair of scissors, and put them back on their half shells into their own broth.

← No. 1044 Lobster with Cream Mussels No. 1046 Mussels a la Mariniere →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a base preparation rather than a finished dish "opens" the mussels and reserves their liquor for the sauces that follow it in the book. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the strained broth.

Strain the liquor twiceThe instruction to pour off gently and leave the sediment is the hinge of the recipe. Decant, then pass it through a coffee filter or a double layer of damp cheesecloth; a single grain of sand ruins whatever sauce you build on it.
QuantityFour quarts of mussels in the shell is a large amount, likely on the order of 5 to 7 lb, yielding perhaps a pound and a half of meat. That is enough for four or more as a first course.
Half a pintOne cup of water or dry white wine. That is enough to steam the pan; the mussels release several times that in their own liquor.
"Tear off the grass"The beard, or byssus, the tuft of fibres the mussel anchors itself with. Pull it toward the hinge, not away. Rope-grown farmed mussels sold today are usually mostly debearded already and need only a scrub, not the repeated washings Ranhofer assumes for wild dredged stock.
Brisk fire, short timeHigh heat, lid on, and 3 to 5 minutes total. Lift them out as they gape rather than waiting for the last stragglers, or the first-opened ones shrink to rubber.
Debearding and timingPulling the beard damages the mussel and is generally held to kill it, so do it just before cooking, not hours ahead. Until then keep them in the fridge under a damp cloth, never sealed in a bag or covered in fresh water.
Discard the closed onesRanhofer does not say it, but any mussel that stays shut after a good steaming goes in the bin, as does any raw one that is broken or that will not close when tapped.
"The foot, the black appendage"He probably means the dark remnant of the beard, trimmed with scissors for appearance once cooked. It is edible; the step is cosmetic and matters only if the mussels are going to table on the half shell.
Holding themReturning the meats to their half shells in the strained broth keeps them from drying out. Do it off the heat, and reheat only briefly when you finish the dish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional system, which is why numbered entries like this one exist at all: No. 1045 does no cooking of its own, it simply supplies cleaned mussels and clarified liquor to the recipes on either side of it, among them moules a la mariniere. The technique is straight French practice of the period, and the fussiness about sand reflects a time when mussels were gathered wild from pilings and beds rather than grown on ropes in clean water. Mussels were cheap shellfish in nineteenth-century America and carried a faint reputation for danger, which may help explain the insistence on several changes of water, decanted broth, and the black foot snipped away.