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Mussels, Ancienne
Thoroughly scrub and wash in running cold water sixty very fresh mussels, place them in a saucepan with a pint water and a teaspoon salt, cover the pan and let steam on the range for fifteen minutes. Remove, drain and pick them out from the shells, place in a baking dish, season with half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika and sprinkle over half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and half teaspoon chopped chives; arrange six thin slices of raw, lean bacon over and sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over all. Set to bake in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove and serve.
A two-stage dish: the mussels are steamed open, shelled, then gratinated. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own fishmonger, so a few gaps need filling.
- The hinge: do not steam for fifteen minutesMussels open in 3 to 6 minutes over high heat, and they are done the moment they gape. Fifteen minutes shrinks them to rubber pellets. Steam covered until the shells open, pull them off the heat at once, and let the oven do the rest of the work.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot oven, 425F, for 12 to 15 minutes is right, since the aim is to crisp the bacon and brown the Parmesan rather than cook anything through.
- QuantitySixty mussels is roughly 4 lb in the shell, which yields perhaps 12 oz of meat. That serves four as a first course, two as a supper dish.
- Sorting the musselsDiscard any that are cracked or that stay open when tapped before cooking, and any that refuse to open after steaming. Today's rope-grown mussels are far cleaner than the wild mussels the recipe was written for; they need a rinse and the beard pulled off, not the hard scrubbing the recipe describes.
- SaltGo carefully with the half teaspoon of added salt. Taste a mussel before seasoning; the shellfish liquor and the bacon and Parmesan carry most of the salt already.
- The baconSix slices laid flat over the dish will shield the mussels rather than season them. Cut the raw bacon into narrow strips or small dice and scatter it, so the fat renders down into the mussels and the pieces actually crisp.
- Save the steaming liquorThe recipe drains it away. Strain off the grit and spoon two or three tablespoons over the mussels in the baking dish, or they will dry out under a hot oven.
- Chives and paprikaBoth are meant to be tasted, not toasted. Paprika scorches bitter at high heat, so mix it into the mussels rather than dusting the surface, and keep a little of the chive and parsley back to add after baking.
À l'ancienne means simply "in the old style," one of the elastic French kitchen labels that in practice signalled a homely, unfussy treatment rather than any fixed formula. The dish is often associated with the northern French and Belgian coast, where mussels were long among the cheapest shellfish on the market and are said to have been sold by volume rather than by weight. Cheese with shellfish is a combination modern French cooking is often said to have turned against, but it was common enough in early twentieth-century gratins, and the bacon here does the job that butter does in a classic moules gratin\under under "The World's Kitchen" is characteristic of the international compendiums that set out to give American households access to continental dishes at a moment when mussels were still regarded in much of the United States as poor people's food or bait, and were rarely sold in inland markets.