No. 1049

Mussels Stuffed a la Toulousaine

Moules Farcies a la Toulousaine

To be prepared the same as for No. 1045. Take them out of their shells after draining, cut off the foot, and divide the mussels up into half inch pieces. Fry in oil a cut up onion, and a whole clove of garlic; add to it fresh bread-crumbs, and moisten with mussel broth and milk; boil and stir in a little finely chopped, cooked spinach, suppress the garlic, and add the mussels. Fill the shells with this; range them on a dish, strew bread-crumbs and parmesan on top, besprinkle with fine oil, and brown them nicely in a quick oven. Serve on a folded napkin.

← No. 1048 Mussels a la Villeroi Mussels No. 1050 Mussels with Fine Herbs, Baked →

For the Modern Kitchen

A stuffed-shell mussel gratin built on a bread panade, from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen. The recipe assumes you have already read No. 1045, where the mussels are steamed open, so most of the work is left unstated.

The cross-referenceNo. 1045 gives the basic preparation this recipe assumes: the mussels are opened over heat and the liquor kept, which is where the "mussel broth" comes from. Discard any that stay shut after cooking, and any that were gaping and would not close beforehand.
"Cut off the foot"Most likely the byssus, the tough fibrous beard that anchors the mussel to rock, though the foot proper is a separate organ; either way it is the tough trimming that comes away. It can be pulled out before steaming or after opening. The dark rim of the mantle can stay.
Strain the brothMussel liquor carries sand and shell grit. Pass it through a fine sieve lined with a cloth before using it to moisten the crumbs, and taste before salting — it is already saline.
The panadeFresh crumbs, mussel broth and milk cooked together should end up thick enough to mound in a half shell without slumping. If it runs, keep it over heat and stir until it pulls away from the pan.
"Suppress the garlic"The whole clove goes in to perfume the oil and is fished out before the mussels are added. Ranhofer's period French uses supprimer in the sense of remove, not crush.
Half-inch piecesWith small cultivated bouchot or blue mussels a rough chop, or leaving them whole, comes to much the same thing.
"Fine oil"Good olive oil, both for frying the onion and for the final sprinkle over the crumbs and parmesan.
A quick oven425–450°F. The filling is already cooked, so the shells go in only long enough to brown the top — five to eight minutes, or finish under the broiler. Longer and the mussel pieces toughen.
Yield and serviceService -- the recipe gives no quantities; scale the filling to the number of shells you have. The dish is sent out on a folded napkin, standard Delmonico's presentation for shells and gratins.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put Moules farcies à la Toulousaine into The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Names ending à la toulousaine in nineteenth-century French cookery usually point to Toulouse and, in the classical garnish sense, to a quite different preparation of sweetbreads and cockscombs in cream; here the label is doing looser regional duty, signalling the southern trio of olive oil, onion and garlic against the butter-and-cream idiom of the north. The spinach bound into the crumb stuffing is the same logic that produced the various green-stuffed shellfish gratins of the Mediterranean coast. Mussels themselves were a hard sell in America at the time — abundant, cheap, and widely regarded as inferior to the oyster — and the finished dish arrives on a folded napkin like something considerably grander.