Dip, slurp, spoon: how to eat mussels with friends

It's a deliciously messy dish made to share — get out the bread and plenty of napkins.

Hello! Hello!

It’s time for another edition of FRIENDSHIP FOOD. Time for me — thanks to you — to make another donation to another organization that helps feed people. To recap, to honor you, my dear, dear readers, I’ve contributed to World Central Kitchen and Meals on Wheels. This month, I’m dedicating a contribution to Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch in your name. In addition to their ground-breaking work in conservation and sustainable seafood, their Seafood Guides are important tools for all of us — I always shop with it. Thank you for making this contribution possible.

And to recap the FRIENDSHIP FOOD recipes — we made a very big, very sharable cookie and we had a tea party, a gloriously beautiful one. And while not officially under the FRIENDSHIP FOOD heading, I count our apéro dinatoire and Apéro’lympics as very friendly parties with good food. Cheers all around.

Getting Messy with Mussels

This month we’re making mussels, a dish that requires you to get messy — I’ve never seen anyone who didn’t use their fingers to eat mussels! And, like most messy dishes, mussels are a dish to share. I can almost guarantee that if you have mussels with strangers, by the time you dunk your last piece of bread into the pot to sop up whatever’s left of the broth, you’ll all be besties.

Photo: Mary Dodd

Getting Neat(ish) with Mussels

I must have eaten mussels before I was married. You’d think I would have, but maybe not. I don’t remember seeing them in the seafood houses my mother and I would go to for lunch on days when it felt as though we were playing hooky. (Actually, thinking back, sometimes we were.) We’d have steamers when they were in season. We might have baked clams, burbling with butter and enough garlic to ward off vampires. Maybe we had a shrimp cocktail. Maybe a crabcake. For sure we always had lobsters and never had oysters — I was a true grown-up before I tackled those. Maybe mussels weren’t a Brooklyn thing in those days. Since my mom and I loved just about everything from the sea, especially if it could be eaten with our hands, slurped, sucked or shelled, mussels, which require all those actions in addition to licking your fingers, would have been just our speed. Instead, I came to them as a married twenty-something, having them first in a fish soup made by friends who cooked foods beyond all the borders I knew, and then, a few years later, on the Cote d’Azur, the ritzy part of France. Specifically in Cannes, the city of red carpets, yachts and, at least for Michael and me, a homey off-the-beaten path bed and breakfast that was a short walk from town and a small restaurant we could afford.

The restaurant was on the main street and open to the sea. The people were worth watching, the fish came whole, head, tail and a million bones, and the mussels came bobbing in a broth that threatened to keep Michael’s glasses fogged for eternity. Also hot enough to remove our fingerprints.

There were three empty bowls on the table — one for each of us and one for the shells. There was a ladle to scoop up the mussels and broth. And there was a big basket of bread. Today, just thinking about the dish — a classic Moules Marinière, or mussels sailor style — makes me ravenous. That night, it terrified me. Were we really supposed to grab the hot, slippery, filled-with-broth shells with our fingers? As far as I knew, the French didn’t even peel oranges with their fingers, at least not in public. (Remind me to tell you about the man at Fouquet’s.) Would they really wrestle a mussel barehanded? We were clueless.

I know, it’s odd that we ordered mussels in the first place. But for us, then, so early in our culinary lives, it was the only possibility. The restaurant offered a fixed menu and the other choice for a starter was something that the waiter described by rubbing his belly in a motion that didn’t say yummy as much as it screamed intestines or tripe or a piece of porcine plumbing. In the event, we trusted the sea.

Just as I was considering our cutlery (and the likelihood of what this adventure would do to my shirt), we looked past our table and saw a beautifully dressed woman eating her mussels with equal measures of elegance and gusto — a splendid combination. We took a beat to study her style.

We had already missed the part where she must have surveyed the mussels she’d spooned into her bowl and picked the small one she was holding in her right hand. She must have used her fork to pluck the mussel out of that shell, but if she did, we never saw her touch the fork again. Instead, with a hot mussel in one hand and the baby shell in the other, she pulled out one plump mussel after another. Think baby bird taking food from mama bird — it was that kind of “pop-in, pop-out, relish the morsel” motion. 

Every once in while she’d sip some of the broth off her spoon, and every once in a while, she’d grab a hunk of bread and dip it into the broth. I couldn’t see if she closed her eyes each time she ate the bread — I did then and have ever since.

But for us, the best part was what she did with the musseless shells: She interlocked them, forming a circle around the edge of the bowl and then spiraling it into the center like a Nautilus until the pot of mussels was empty and her bowl was full. Forming a necklace from the shells made order out of chaos. And it might just have been a kick for her.

Whatever it was for her, it was a delight for us. And yes, if you ever see a bowl going back to the kitchen with a necklace of empty mussel shells, it’s a good bet it’s ours. Or Madame’s.

A necklace of cleaned mussel shells Michael built.

Making Mussels at Home for Family and Friends

If you didn’t grow up with mussels, didn’t see them cooked at home, didn’t find them readily at the fishmarket, then they might seem a bit out of the usual, maybe even untackleable. But if you can sauté an onion, you can make classic — or not-at-all-classic — Moules Marinière. It’s an easy-enough-for-a-Tuesday dish and one that you can party around.

Make a mess of mussels. Put the pot in the center of the table. Have plenty of bread — I like to to score baguettes, put them on the table and let everyone rip off hunk after hunk. Drink wine or beer or sparkling water. You won’t need bibs, but you’ll need a stack of napkins.

Read on — I’ve got lots of easy info for you and a recipe that you can riff on endlessly. Necklacing the shells: Optional.

MOULES MARINIÈRE

A basic recipe with room to riff