In England, this was anglicised to rocket. The Americans, as we are all too aware, have a different lexicon. They call it arugula. This came to America through another dialect, a part of Italy where the plant is known as rucola. I have brought home two bags from the bulk foods shop. One is cream of tartar, the other is baking powder.
How can I tell them apart now that they have been mixed up? One is acidic, the other alkaline. Take a teaspoon of each and place them on separate plates. Add a teaspoon of vinegar to each. Vinegar is acidic and will react with the alkaline powder, the baking powder sodium bicarbonate , by fizzing up.
Cream of tartar potassium bitartrate , being acidic, won't react. It uses its specific adductor muscles. When we cook them, the heat can have a few effects on the adductor muscles that keep the two halves of their shells stuck together. Sometimes, the heat can denature the proteins in the adductor muscles so that they simply disintegrate, or sometimes, it can make one or both ends of the adductor muscles come unstuck from the shell. Nick Ruello found that 1.
These mussels opened before they had been cooked long enough to kill any potential pathogens in them. If you removed them from the stove once they opened and ate these mussels, you would be at risk of food poisoning. But you would get a strong hint from the texture of the meat — it would be unappetizing, jelly-like, un-coagulated, and stuck to the perimeter of the shell.
At the other extreme, he found that some When he forced them open with a knife, every single one was both adequately cooked and safe to eat. So, according to Nick Ruello, even if the adductor muscles refuse to bow to the heat, the meat is still safe to eat.
But on the occasions when he cooked them for a further 90 seconds, about one-seventh of them still remained shut. And in the mussels that finally did open, thanks to the overcooking, the meat was now shrunken and tough. There is a ligament at the hinged part of the shell, call it the rear, and this is attached in a way that basically makes it act like a spring that forces the shell open. So, if before you cook it, the shell is open, that just means the mussel is chilling out.
But once you bother it by tapping it on the counter, it should close right up. Meaning the little guy is alive and his adductor muscle is in working order. The healthy response of the healthy bivalve, upon being whacked, is to close up tight. But the part about the heat making the adductor relax, thus opening the shell, got me to thinking, who says? The thing is, there always seems to be some unopened mussels in every batch, and I began to think that maybe I would research this a little and see where it came from.
All I found was a lot of the same thing being repeated. And if they were open, you would have whacked them a good one to see if they would close. I went around in this circle and then was lucky enough to happen upon a book written by Karl Kruszelnicki called. The author starts by saying there is no mention of the myth in two influential cookbooks of the mids, Larousse Gastronomique and Italian Food by Elizabeth David and , respectively.
I cannot confirm this as I was unable to find an edition of the former and was only able to find a modern edition of the latter, Italian Food by David, and it did mention the shells opening but not the discard part. He goes on to say that by the s, 13 percent of cookbooks were agreeing with Grigson, and by the s, this had risen to 31 percent. Such precise figures! Apparently, by the s, there was almost universal agreement among cookbook writers. Curious and Curiouser. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, It is mentioned in several works by James Beard prior to that time, as early as It is mentioned in numerous and various documents of the early twentieth century, as well.
Cooking mussels until they open, or a variation, until they begin to open, is nothing very new at all. According to Kruszlnicki, Grigson gave no clear reason as to why the unopened mussels should be thrown away, so we cannot even be sure when the idea that unopened mussels were spoiled came about. Even freshwater mussels have been canned in the past, although we hardly touch them today. And there was the freshwater mussel pearl industry, which would have also cooked droves of mussels until opened, to get at pearls, should they exist.
There may be another practical reason for the later perpetuation of it, however, that does not necessarily have to do with expediency and economics. This is also related to why James Peterson recommends cooking mussels until they open. Regardless, cooking mussels until they open is an old, old instruction. Whether Grigson got the ball rolling on discarding unopened mussels, it is near impossible to tell.
Whether she just made it up or had been taught this we may never know. It certainly was not a foregone conclusion, according to the science of the time, that you could tell if a mussel was good by how it behaved when you cooked it. Mussel poisoning used to be quite a big problem.
Often, mussels were gathered in areas of sewer runoff, for instance. It was quickly known that the dangerous contaminates in these mussels were not affected after a few minutes of cooking, and opened mussels would have meant nothing. In some outbreaks, boilings of 30 minutes failed to ameliorate the danger.
On the west coast of the U. Poisonings were reported, like the one outlined in this paper from the California Dept. The same types of toxin danger have happened along other coastlines and cooking has no effect on the chemicals. Bad mussels, in fact, were known to be a common problem in the late s and early s both of the paralytic or nervous toxin variety or the gastroenteric variety. Given the history of the mussel as causing either toxic or pathogenic food-poisoning outbreak that did not always respond to extended heat application, it is hard to see why anyone would assume that an open mussel should be a good mussel, as many of these poisonous mussels would have indeed opened, simply due to the fact that the adductor muscle broke down.
Now, although there is still the occasional outbreak of food poisoning from shellfish contaminated with pathogens, and, unfortunately, still illnesses from paralytic shellfish poisoning, there is very little need to worry about the kind of stubborn pathogens that were present in mussels gathered from sewage-contaminated waters these days.
Curious and Curiouser, which is a cool science trivia book, led me to another guy named Nick Ruello, who is the origin of the Jane Grigson connection. LinkedIn profile. Seafood Services Austrailia, Jan. Research by scientists at the Instituto Espanol de Oceanografia in Murcia, Spain, published in the "Journal of Environmental Monitoring" in May found significant differences in heavy metal concentration in mussels along coastal waters in the Western Mediterranean Sea.
The scientists report that the run-off of water containing land minerals and chemicals from industrial activities impacts the heavy metal concentrations in the waters. Mussels can contain adenoviruses and increase your risk of infection. Adenoviruses cause gastrointestinal, bladder and respiratory infections that may result in diarrhea, rash and pneumonia. Research by scientists at the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Fiskebackskil, Sweden, published in the "International Journal of Food Microbiology" in February discovered high rates of blue mussels contaminated with adenovirus.
The scientists conclude the highly variable rate and sporadic occurrence of accumulated viruses is a significant factor affecting food safety.
Cryptosporidium parvum oocysts are parasites that infect the gastrointestinal tract.
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