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Mussels, Soup of

A soup made with mussels, stock, egg yolks, butter, mace, cayenne pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Mussels, Soup of

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine half of the stock with the pounded mussels in a pot.

  2. In a mortar, pound the egg yolks with butter, mace, cayenne, and salt. Add the mixture to the pot.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the soup.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the remaining stock and simmer for a few minutes.

  2. Stir in the additional mussels and heat without boiling.

  3. Serve with toasted bread.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mussels
Provide the main savory flavor and body of the soup.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the soup as they are pounded smooth.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounder, silkier mouthfeel and carries the spices.
Fish or meat stock
Forms the liquid base that carries all the other flavors.

The step that matters

Heat the added mussels without boiling. Boiling toughens mussel meat and can make egg-enriched soups curdle or turn grainy, so the soup should only be heated gently once the extra mussels go in.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, egg, butter, pepper, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, egg, butter, pepper, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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