MOULES À LA MARINIÈRERecipe from Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking Maine.&

MOULES À LA MARINIÈRE
Recipe from Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking Maine. 

Perhaps the most stunning place in the world. The place where I feel most at peace, intertwined with my family and nature, buried deep in books and blueberries. Until his death last year, my grandfather was a famous concert violinist, and during the summers, he traveled north to Blue Hill, Maine to teach at Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival. The family went along, and I have spent at least one summer week every year of my life taking naps by the ocean and stuffing my face with lobster. 

We don’t leave it at lobster. We love seafood - steamers, crabs, and mussels. So my father came up with the idea (he is always coming up with idea, adventures, curiosities to discover) to dig for our own mussels. We waited for low tide, took two plastic buckets, and drove to the nearby rapids. At first, we found nothing. There were lots of mussels, but the shells were open, and empty. But then we walked a little further from the bridge, waded out into the water to our ankles, and pushed back seaweed from the rocks. And there they were, millions, billions, endless mussels in every nook and cranny, ready for me and my greedy hands. The hardest part about digging for mussels is stepping away from the oddly satisfying excitement and satisfaction of throwing the mussels into the basket - telling yourself to stop, that you already have 75 mussels, and really, it is not necessary to get even one more. 

Ingredients:

• 2 cups light, dry white win or 1 cup dry white vermouth
• An 8- to 10-quart enameled kettle with cover
• ½ cup minced shallots, or green onions, or very finely minced onions • 8 parsley sprigs
• ½ bay leaf
• ¼ teaspoon thyme
• 1/8 teaspoon pepper
• 6 tablespoons butter
• 6 quarts scrubbed, soaked mussels
• ½ cup roughly chopped parsley

Directions:

• Bring all but the last two ingredients to boil in the kettle. Boil for 2 to 3 minutes to evaporate its alcohol and to reduce its volume slightly.
• Add the mussels to the kettle. Cover tightly and boil quickly over high heat. Frequently grasp the kettle with both hands, your thumbs clamped to the cover, and toss the mussels in the kettle and an up and down slightly jerky motion so the mussels will change levels and cook evenly. In about 5 minutes, the shells will swing open and the mussels are done.
• With a big skimmer, dip the mussels into wide soup places. Allow the cooking liquid to settle for a moment so any sand will sink to the bottom. Then ladle the liquid over the mussels, sprinkle with the parsley and serve immediately with toasted baguette slices.