No. 1048

Mussels a la Villeroi

Moules a la Villeroi

These must be prepared as for No. 1045. Take the mussels from their shells; cut off the foot without injuring the mussel, then dip them into an allemande sauce (No. 407) with cooked fine herbs, well reduced and partially cold; dip them in for the second time when very cold, then put them aside in the ice-box for one hour; lift them up with a thin knife, immerse them in beaten eggs, then in bread-crumbs and fry them of a fine color; serve on folded napkins.

← No. 1047 Mussels a la Poulette Mussels No. 1049 Mussels Stuffed a la Toulousaine →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic Villeroi treatment: cooked shellfish masked in a very thick sauce, chilled until firm, then breaded and fried. Ranhofer assumes you have his sauce chapter open, so the cross-references need filling in.

The hinge: the sauce must be stiff, not pourableAllemande sauce (No. 407) is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison; for Villeroi work it has to be reduced until a spoon leaves a clean track and it sets almost solid when cold. If it is thin, the coating slides off the mussels in the fryer and you get bare shellfish in a pan of scorched sauce.
What No. 1045 meansRanhofer sends the reader back to an earlier mussel entry for the initial cooking; that text is not reproduced here, so look it up before starting. In general terms it is the basic preparation: mussels cooked only until the shells open, with any that stay shut discarded and the liquor strained and kept.
"Cut off the foot"The trimming is at the hinge end: the tough attachment, strictly the byssus threads or beard rather than the foot proper, taken off with scissors or a knife tip so the body of the mussel stays whole. Leave the mussel intact or it will fall apart in the breading.
Cooked fine herbsIn Ranhofer's usage this is a cooked mixture, typically shallot, mushroom and parsley chopped fine and sweated in butter until dry before going into the sauce; the exact herbs vary. Raw herbs release water and loosen the coating.
The two dips and the chillingCoat, let set, coat again when thoroughly cold, then refrigerate an hour at minimum. Two hours is better, and a spell in the freezer just before breading makes the mussels far easier to handle. Ranhofer's "ice-box" is simply your refrigerator.
FryingDeep fry at 350-375F for one to two minutes, only until the crumbs are golden. The mussels are already cooked; longer frying makes them rubbery and melts the sauce out through the crust.
Quantity and yieldThe original gives none. As a rough working estimate, three dozen mussels will take about a cup of finished allemande and serve four as a first course.
ServingThe folded napkin was there to blot fry oil on a silver platter. A rack or paper on a warm plate does the same job, with lemon or a sharp sauce alongside.
BuyingUse live mussels with closed or closing shells, cooked the day you buy them. Any that refuse to open after steaming go in the bin, not into the sauce.

A Little History

À la Villeroi covers a whole family of French dishes in which a cooked morsel — sweetbread, chicken wing, calf's brain, oyster, mussel — is masked in a stiff reduced velouté, chilled to firmness, then crumbed and deep fried. The name is generally traced to the Villeroy family of French marshals and court figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though as with most such attributions the connection is traditional rather than documented. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades and published The Epicurean in 1894, treats it as standard grammar: the book runs several mussel preparations in sequence — poulette, Villeroi, stuffed à la Toulousaine — each cross-referenced to a base sauce, on the assumption that the reader is a professional working through a numbered system rather than a home cook following a single page.