Folks who wander into the
mussel node no doubt develop a keen desire to cook a
mess of mussels for dinner, but may be intimidated by the fine recipes of
gastronaut sneff, who is a professional. (I enjoyed his write-up immensely, though remain puzzled by "
domesticated" mussels; I've stared at mussels in the wild for hours at a time, and they seem no less tame than the critters that come freshly bagged from our neighborhood
fishmonger. Maybe the domesticated ones have been
vaccinated....)
I offer here a fool-proof recipe for mussels, provided that the mussels are alive when you start. Nothing like a bad mollusk to destroy your romantic evening, but no worse than making sloppy joes out of rotten cow meat. Just buy them fresh, take care of them the few hours (and never more than a few) you have them between the store and your belly, and relax when you cook them. You'll be a hit.
I modified the recipe from a standard at Emilio's Restaurant, a 3rd generation Italian joint in the Village that disappeared about 10 years ago, though I doubt it's much different from any other recipe for mussels in a white sauce.
The first "secret" is fresh mussels, mentioned above.
The second? (Pssst...listen carefully...it's the garlic.) Garlic! Lots and lots! I could cook dead-for-three-days pigeon scraped off the 59th Street Bridge in this stuff, and still have a hit. Mussels taste a a whole lot better than street-scraped squab.
- 2 pounds (a kilo, more or less) of mussels
- At least 1/2 bulb (8-10 cloves--I trust cloves are the same in metric) of fresh garlic
- Half stick of butter
- 4-16 ounces (100cc to a half liter) of olive oil
- half a bottle of decent chardonnay (only drown mussels with wine you'd drink straight)
- Fresh cilantro, about a tablespoon (15 cc) chopped--if you cannot find fresh leaves, do not bother1
- A few shakes of Tabasco pepper sauce
- A pound (half kilo) of spaghetti
Melt the butter in a large sauce pan, then gently cook the garlic in the butter. Do not char the garlic.
Once the cloves are gently heated in the butter, dunk in enough olive oil to get the garlic wading (though not drowning) in the pan.
Once the oil and garlic are well warmed up, add about half a bottle of wine--get the sauce up to a good simmer. Add the cilantro leaves, roughly chopped.
Right before pouring in the mussels (each inspected and cleaned before its demise), I crank up the heat to get the sauce boiling. I also say a prayer. The connoisseurs among you may be mortified, but I'd rather have the mussels die a quick death at the possible expense of culinary orgasm than sup on slowly killed critters. My method seems to work well enough, and the garlic likely destroys any subtle gustatory points anyway.
Cook a few minutes until the mussels start to open. I sometimes tilt the pan to soak the mussels with the sauce. As the mussels open, you can remove them, or, if you're busy romanticizing your love, just let them all cook until most of them open.
Dump the whole shebang on the spaghetti--if it's a bit crunchy, remember to a) boil the spaghetti next time, and b) avoid munching on the mussel shells. (Be aware that you may occasionally bite into a mussel pearl--it will not make you rich, though it may add a few dollars to your dentist's pocket.)
1 Fresh cilantro is a taste worth acquiring; the slightly pungent muskiness counters the surprisingly sweet mussels.
To folks across the pond: the metric conversions are a bit haphazard, but then again, so were the imperial measurements. If a reasonable amount of the ingredients are in the same room together, it should come out fine.