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Mussels with Egg Sauce
(Arselle in salsa d'uovo) A good washing with fresh water is sufficient for mussels that do not have any sand to be cleaned away. Put them on the fire with a sauce of oil, garlic, parsley and a pinch of pepper.
Shake them and keep the saucepan covered seeing that they do not absorb all of the sauce. Take them out when they are open and prepare the following sauce: one or more yolks of egg, according to the quantity, lemon juice, one teaspoonful of flour, broth and some of their own juice. Cook this sauce until it becomes a smooth cream and pour it on the mussels when they are served. 121
A two-stage dish: the shellfish steam open in an oil-and-garlic base, then a lemon-egg liaison is thickened separately and spooned over. The instructions assume a cook who already knows both operations, so the quantities are left open.
- Arselle are not musselsArselle is the Tuscan and Ligurian word for small hard-shell clams, close to what a fishmonger sells as vongole or cockles. The translator rendered it as mussels; either works with this method, but clams give the briny cooking liquor the sauce depends on.
- Working quantitiesFor four people, 2 lb of clams or 3 lb of mussels in the shell, opened with 3 tablespoons olive oil, two crushed garlic cloves and a handful of chopped parsley. The egg sauce then wants two yolks, the juice of half a lemon, a level teaspoon of flour and about half a cup of broth plus strained shellfish liquor.
- Purging and sortingThe note that a rinse suffices applies to shellfish already free of grit; clams usually are not. Soak them in cold salted water for an hour and lift them out rather than pouring them off. Discard any that are cracked or that stay shut after steaming.
- Do not overcook the shellsShellfish are done the moment they gape, four to six minutes over high heat. Pull each one out as it opens rather than waiting for the last stragglers, or the early ones shrink to rubber.
- Keep the liquorThe warning about not letting them absorb all the sauce is really about protecting the pan juices, which carry most of the flavour into the egg sauce. Strain them through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch sand.
- The hinge: the egg sauce must not boilThe hinge: keep the egg sauce below a boil -- Whisk the flour into the cold broth first, then the yolks and lemon, and cook over low heat or a bain-marie, stirring, until it coats a spoon at around 165-175F. The teaspoon of flour gives the yolks some protection, but pushed much hotter the sauce can still curdle, and once it does it is hard to bring back.
- Temper before combiningAdd the hot shellfish liquor to the yolk mixture in a thin stream, not the reverse. Pour the finished sauce over shellfish that are warm rather than piping hot so it does not split on the plate.
- ServingServes four as an antipasto or first course, two as a main with bread. The sauce is thin by modern standards, closer to a pourable custard than a coating, and is meant to be mopped up.
This comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), a slim New York volume that carried Italian home cooking to English-speaking readers in the years when Italian immigration was reshaping American kitchens; much of it reads as a condensed borrowing from Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina of 1891, the book generally credited with codifying regional Italian cooking into a single domestic canon. The dish is of a kind associated with the coasts where arselle were plentiful and cheap, Liguria and Sardinia as much as the Tyrrhenian shore. What lifts this version is the egg-and-lemon liaison, a thickening trick found all round the Mediterranean, from Greek avgolemono to the French liaison taught in professional kitchens, and one that suited a period cook well: it enriched a dish without cream, using an egg and a lemon that were already in the house.