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By Root 990 0

as far as Britain is concerned is that they are not sold in the holiday season. Why not, I wonder? It would be fun to make that strange barbecue of the Ile d’Oléron known as an éclade or églade. There it is the great family picnic on the beach. You need a really thick plank of wood, well moistened and steadied on stones so that it lies flat. In the centre you have four nails. Or else you use a large piece of thick slate and cut a potato so that it sits firmly in the centre. Against nails or potato you prop up four of your largest mussels, hinge to the sky, convex curve turned out towards you. This is your base. Around them you continue to prop up mussels in the same way, keeping the smallest for the outside, until you have a great rosette. This is covered with dry pine needles and small pine twigs to make a bed about 12½ cm (5 inches) thick. You put a light to it and by the time the flames die down, the mussels have opened and are ready to eat, with bread and plenty of Charentes butter and a dry white wine, once you have fanned away the ashes.

You may wonder why mussels do not play a larger part in our diet. It seems to me that they have, as it were, come up in the world in the last thirty years. Unlike lobsters, crabs, scallops and oysters, they have played no part – either here or in France – in grand cookery, haute cuisine. They were of interest to eighteenth-century middle-class families, judging by the recipes in cookery books of the time for scalloped mussels, mussel stews, pickled mussels. But by the mid-nineteenth century they seem to have disappeared: no recipes appear in Mrs Beeton or – and this is more surprising – in Eliza Acton. Cassell’s Dictionary of the 1880s gives a number of mussel dishes and comments that we should eat more, but people are frightened of being poisoned. In other words mussels were an even more rapid casualty of our industrial revolution than oysters.

In France, where estuaries and shores suffered less from pollution, mussels have appeared on menus for a long time. Many of us first learned to enjoy them there. I would say they are very much part of that passionate search for regional food that began at the end of the last century and took off on Michelin tyres with Curnonsky, and with the aid of the first Michelin maps. Knowing people, the ones who read Boulestin’s books in the thirties in Britain, might have served mussels from time to time, but their popularity has risen only since Elizabeth David gave a good number of recipes for them in the fifties and then in French Provincial Cooking in 1960. The bonus of our past neglect of mussels is their low price today. I am sure that this cannot last – remember what happened to monkfish, which in 1970 you could buy for 35P a pound. Make the most of mussels, while they are still at a price that makes experimentation possible.

TO OPEN MUSSELS

METHOD 1

Pick over the mussels and remove any that are cracked or that remain obstinately open when tapped with a sharp knife. Occasionally you will come across a mussel that is extraordinarily heavy for its size: this usually means it is full of tarry mud. Either throw it away, or open it separately if you are not quite sure.

Scrub the mussels under the cold tap, then scrape off any barnacles and accretions. Remove the fine black ‘beard’ with a sharp tug and rinse the mussels in a large bowl of cold water.

Have ready a colander set over a basin to take the mussels as they are opened.

Turn the heat on your hob to very high. Take a wide heavy sauté pan and put in a close single layer of mussels. Put on the lid. Set over the heat and leave for 30 seconds. Check to see if the mussels are open. Remove any that are, put back the lid and leave for another 10 seconds. The point is to give the mussels the minimum time possible over the heat (ignore cookery book instructions suggesting 2 minutes or even longer: this is unnecessary if you open mussels in single layer batches). When all are opened, remove and cook the next and subsequent batches.

Finally strain the mussel liquor through doubled muslin or