The mussel recipe is kind of funny in that like all mussel recipes from the 1990s and before in cookbooks, it basically assumes that most of the mussels you’re getting from a fish store are wild and will need extensive cleaning (removing the ‘beard’) and so on, whereas at least for the last fifteen years or so, I think every time I’ve bought mussels they’ve been cultivated and very rarely need the same degree of careful prior attention.
Recipes back then (and I think even now) also made a legitimately big deal out of “don’t eat a dead mussel” (e.g., one that doesn’t open when steamed) because they just figure that a home chef or the people they’re feeding might pry a closed mussel open, whereas a good restaurant generally takes the closed mussels out of a cooked batch before serving. Miller repeats the claim that you need to get the dead ones out of there before cooking (the dead ones are generally open at that point) or they’ll spoil the whole thing, and I have to admit I’ve wondered about that over the years. I do pick through to get rid of dead ones beforehand, but the thing is, no matter how careful you are, there’s also always some dead ones after cooking that need to be tossed (or that you need to warn people off in case you miss one at service). It kind of means that in an average batch of cultivated mussels there’s maybe some all dead mussels and then there’s some that are only mostly dead. And much as we might truly love mussels, in this case mostly dead is all dead, it’s just that it takes cooking to show it.
I actually found a terrific analysis of how mussel-cooking advice changed over the years, and the author’s working hypothesis that the advice took hold as a strategy because mussels in the early 20th Century were being taken from wild stocks in areas that had contaminated water from cities (hence the “never eat shellfish in months with no Rs” advice) but that because contemporary mussels are almost always cultivated, it might be ok to eat mussels that don’t open after cooking. However, even the author agrees that the advice to toss the dead ones (those that are open and that don’t close when tapped) before cooking remains sound.
On a different note, it’s been really interesting how chipotle over the last thirty years has become a ubiquitously popular ingredient in prepared food, although it can still be surprisingly difficult to find canned or dried chipotles in your average Mid-Atlantic supermarket (and, I would presume, in the Midwest and the rest of the East Coast). The sauce that canned chipotles are packed in has always been a kind of miracle food for me as a cook, only you can’t wow people quite the way that you could twenty years ago, because now they know the taste.
(Apologies for the Goya label here: I don’t buy any of their product any more except for canned chipotles, and it’s really just because that’s what I can usually get.)
Chipotle doesn’t overwhelm dishes the way that smoked paprika (which I also love) often does, and the heat of chipotles is generally easy to cut or soften if need be. They also, as per this recipe’s use of orange and lime, really work well with citrus acid. Though for this reason there is nothing that annoys me more than seeing something described as “chipotle this or that” on a restaurant menu or in a prepared product and finding that it has only the faintest wisp of chipotle flavor. They’re not expensive, so when that’s what you get, it’s because the restaurant or company chickened out and decided to try and get the appeal of the name without delivering the flavor that made it appealing because they’re scared that some old white guy is going to complain that his dish is spicy.
I toyed with making fries for this, as I love mussels and fries, but I think this is more of a bread-and-mussel dish. Side dishes, salads, etc. with mussels have always seemed excessive to me—mussels are the whole deal when I eat them.
I will say that I was slightly surprised that the mayonnaise, despite the requisite one-hour time in the fridge and the cooking broth were not as deeply flavored as I actually expected. It was more like the usual mussel broth with a relatively slight chipotle taste and a slightly stronger orange taste. I think if I did it again, I might add some white wine to the cooking broth, which is my usual mussel thing.
This was also, of course, an opportunity to make some good margaritas.
VERDICT: It stays on the shelf, though it really isn’t a book that I will or could use all that often—there’s a lot of later books that are more inspirational or useful to me.