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Mussels, Mariniere
Scrape with a knife, briskly brush and wash in several fresh waters forty-eight large, fresh mussels; then drain on a sieve. Finely mince eight sound shallots, place in a large saucepan with half ounce melted butter and thoroughly heat for two minutes only, then add the mussels. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and let steam for five minutes; add one clove finely chopped garlic, one tablespoon chopped parsley, one gill white wine; cook for five minutes more, then add half gill cream and one ounce fresh bread crumbs. Mix well with a wooden spoon and boil for two minutes longer. Pour into a large, deep, hot dish and serve.
A straightforward moules marinière, written before farmed rope-grown mussels made the scrubbing far less arduous. The main adjustments are timing and salt.
- The hinge: cook until they open, then stopThe original steams the mussels five minutes, then another five with wine, then boils two more — twelve minutes in total, which turns them into erasers. Cultivated mussels open in three to five minutes over high heat; pull the pan off as soon as the shells are wide and finish the sauce separately if it needs reducing.
- A gillIn American measure a gill is 4 fl oz (half a cup), making the wine 4 fl oz and the half gill of cream 2 fl oz; by the imperial gill of 5 fl oz they would be 5 fl oz and 2 1/2. Use something dry and unoaked.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes mussels rinsed in many changes of water and possibly soaked. Mussels release a good deal of salty liquor of their own; season the finished broth at the end rather than the raw shellfish at the start.
- Cleaning and sortingRope-grown mussels rarely need scraping, but they still need debearding — pull the tuft of byssal threads out toward the hinge. Discard any that stay open when tapped before cooking, and any that stay shut after.
- Shallots and garlicEight shallots for four dozen mussels is generous by modern taste; four large ones is plenty. The half ounce of butter (one tablespoon) is also lean — double it and let the shallots soften without browning rather than merely "heat for two minutes."
- The breadcrumbsOne ounce of fresh crumbs is the period thickener, standing in for a roux. It works, but stir it into the hot liquid off the boil or it clumps; a fine dry crumb dissolves more evenly than a coarse fresh one.
- YieldForty-eight large mussels is roughly four pounds in the shell — two generous main courses with bread, or four first courses.
- ServingThe deep hot dish matters more than it sounds. Mussels shed heat fast in a shallow bowl, and the broth is the point; warm the serving dish and put out a second bowl for shells.
Marinière means simply "in the sailor's manner" — mussels steamed open in whatever wine, onion and herb were to hand, a method claimed along the whole Channel and North Sea coast from Normandy through Flanders into Zeeland rather than traceable to any one kitchen. Its appearance in an English-language international collection of this period reflects how thoroughly French restaurant vocabulary had colonised American and British menu-writing; the recipe reads, at least arguably, as the work of a compiler writing in a professional register, down to the wooden spoon and the exact half ounce of butter. The breadcrumb finish is worth noting as a survival of older practice: bread is often said to have served as a body-giver for shellfish liquor before flour-and-butter thickenings dominated, and it appears in mussel and oyster stews on both sides of the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century. Mussels themselves were cheap, gathered food, which is part of why the recipe calls for four dozen without a flicker of concern about cost.