No. 1050

Mussels with Fine Herbs, Baked

Moules aux Fines Herbes Gratinees

Prepare and cook the mussels as for No. 1045. Take them entirely out of their shells; cut off the foot with scissors, and range them one beside the other on a buttered dish; sprinkle the top over with finely and separately chopped up shallots, onions, mushrooms, and parsley; lay bread-crumbs and grated parmesan over, pour in some melted butter, and set the dish in the oven for eight or ten minutes.

← No. 1049 Mussels Stuffed a la Toulousaine Mussels No. 1051 Mussels with Shallot →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have already cooked the mussels by the earlier method and gives no quantities at all, which is normal for The Epicurean — it was written for professionals working from a numbered system. The gratin itself is quick and forgiving; the work is in the preparation.

The cross-referenceNo. 1045 is the base preparation for the mussels; the method for opening and cooking them is given there rather than here, so it should be consulted rather than assumed. Mussels that stay shut after cooking are conventionally discarded.
"Cut off the foot"In kitchen usage this is generally taken to mean the beard, the dark fibrous byssus the mussel anchors itself with (strictly a product of the foot rather than the foot itself). Rope-grown mussels tend to carry less of it, and much can be pulled away before cooking; scissors after shelling catch the remnants.
Oven heatRanhofer gives none. For a gratin of this kind you want 425–450F, hot enough to colour the crumbs and cheese in the eight to ten minutes stated. At a moderate oven the mussels will overcook before the top browns; a broiler for the last minute is a reasonable substitute.
"Finely and separately chopped"The wording looks deliberate, though Ranhofer gives no reason. Chopping each aromatic on its own plausibly keeps the shallot, onion, mushroom and parsley distinct rather than bruising them into a wet paste; the mushrooms want chopping fine and dry, close to a duxelles cut.
Working quantitiesFor 2 lb of mussels in the shell, an appetiser for four, figure a large shallot, a small onion, 3 oz mushrooms, a good handful of parsley, half a cup of breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons parmesan and 3 tablespoons melted butter.
Raw aromaticsThe onion and mushroom go on raw and have only eight minutes of oven time. Sweating them briefly in butter first, then cooling, gives a better result and avoids the raw-onion bite the original tolerates.
Parmesan with shellfishAn old French kitchen convention that modern Italian practice frowns on but which works here: the cheese is a browning agent as much as a flavour, used in small quantity under the crumbs.
ServingServe straight from the dish, very hot, with bread. Reheated mussel gratin turns leathery, so it does not hold.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole of that repertoire in some 3,500 numbered receipts, cross-referenced like an engineering manual. The mussel section is a small window on how a French chef in America handled a shellfish that Americans of the period largely ignored, while mussels were cheap and plentiful. The gratinée treatment here follows a familiar pattern: a shallow buttered dish, a savoury crumb, cheese and butter, and a short blast of heat. The combination of shallot, mushroom and parsley here is essentially a loose duxelles, and the dish sits close to the moules farcies still cooked along the French and Belgian coasts.