More on moules

Pic: Ed Alcock for The New York Times
On a beach in western France, fresh mussels finish roasting on a bed of pine branches. They are eaten with just bread and butter.
Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/dining/23france.html?ex=1313985600&en=6c7e7e16bc3324d2&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

A Passion for Mussels
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: August 23, 2006
ÎLE DE RÉ, France

THE few Americans who come to this scrubby Atlantic island all seem to describe it the same way. It’s “the French Nantucket,” according to New Englanders, or “Francehampton” to New Yorkers, who feel at home with its combination of lively beach towns, sandy potato fields, washed-blue skies and shellfish shacks.

The Île de Ré is about two miles out from the city of La Rochelle, and about 3,300 miles east of Portland, Me. The terrain may seem familiar, but once you sit down at one of the island’s restaurants, you know you’re not in the United States.

That’s because while clams and oysters are the stars of summer in New England, this region, the Charente-Maritime, is besotted with mussels. Yes, there are oyster bars and clam shacks on the beach that rival Maine’s finest, where the shellfish are cracked open and served raw, so fresh from the water that you can see them recoil from a squeeze of lemon.

But it’s local mussels that show up when villages here host big public dinners — the equivalent of pancake breakfasts — in the town square, like the “Fête Moules Frites” held in La Couarde-sur-Mer during the Bastille Day holiday weekend this year.

And mussels, not clams, are the primary ingredient for the local version of the New England clambake. Éclade de moules is a kind of ritualized mussel-roast, which can be as simple as a family beach picnic or can be expanded to feed hundreds for a wedding. It takes patience and steady hands to arrange the mussels in the traditional pattern of concentric circles. But other than that, it’s the simplest dish imaginable.

“For the real éclade de moules,” said a shellfish dealer at the Thursday market in the island town of Ars-en-Ré, “all you need is mussels, pine needles and bread and butter.”
The mussels are arranged on a plank of pine that has been soaked in seawater, then covered with pine branches or grape vines that are set alight. In about five minutes, the smoldering branches are swept away, leaving behind a bracing aroma and mussels filled with smoky meat.
Beyond éclade, mussels are on every menu, most often steamed open in white wine and seawater and finished with spoonfuls of crème fraîche. On the coast, the favorite dish is mouclade, in which mussels are steamed open and their top shells are removed, and then they are drowned in a succulent, curry-spiked cream sauce.

“La Rochelle was a major port for spices from Spain and Africa,” said Wilfried Boutillier, a La Rochelle native who is the chef at Maximilien, in Seattle: mussels, including a version of mouclade, are the restaurant’s specialty. “And of course we eat mussels there every day.”
For locals, there is no substitute for the region’s “moules bouchots,” raised in clusters on wood posts. “Our mussels are the best and the fattest because the water is warmer than in Brittany and Normandy,” France’s other major mussel-growing regions, said Hugo Bordin, a 25-year-old chef at Au Bord’un Zinc in the Île de Ré town of St.-Martin. “That makes the mussels sweeter.” Mr. Bordin’s family has been fishing on the island for more generations than he can remember.

But the region’s mussel farmers are smarting from a July decision to award a coveted Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée designation to the mussels that grow in the Norman bay of Mont-St.-Michel, in sight of the famous cathedral. (The designation is bestowed on regional European foods and wines, which then enjoy protected labeling status.) “Those mussels might have a better view,” said a waitress at Mr. Bordin’s restaurant, “but they don’t taste any better than ours.”

In the Bay of Aiguillon, which surrounds the Île de Ré and the Île de Oléron and washes the coastline of Charente-Maritime, fishermen have been using the post method to raise mussels since the 13th century.

Left alone, mussels grow plentifully on the ocean floor in the intertidal zone of most oceans — near the shore, where the pounding surf provides the highly oxygenated water that helps them grow thick protective shells. The mussel uses the skein of proteins called the beard to attach itself to rocks on the ocean floor, where it picks up sediment and sand and can even grow pearls.

But according to the Musée de la Mytiliculture, on the mainland in nearby Esnandes (one of three mussel-culture museums in France), in the 1200’s a shipwrecked Irishman, Patrick Walton, washed up on local shores and, trying to survive by catching seabirds in nets, inadvertently began collecting mussels on wooden posts. The method is still used, virtually unchanged, by modern producers, because it produces full-flavored mussels with no sediment.

“Mussels on posts are exposed to the air and the sun as the tide comes in and out, instead of feeding all day like mussels that are rope-raised in deep water,” said Frédérique Derrey, a marketing manager for Edulis, one of the largest producers. “They grow more slowly and closer to the shore, so there are more influences on the flavor: the air, the sun, the water, even the soil.”

Moules bouchots are the most expensive in markets all over France. Normandy’s newly anointed A.O.C. mussels are raised using the same method: there, mussel growers claim to have been using bouchots since the ninth century.

In Maine, memories are not that long, but fishermen remember clearly when mussels were a trash fish at best and a pest at worst.

“I’ll tell you who ate mussels in America 25 years ago,” said Paul Brayton, a Maine-based expert in shellfish aquaculture. “In a pizza joint in Jersey, if your pizza was taking too long, they used to send out half a dozen mussels on the half shell. They would be frozen, and about 4 inches long, and chewy, and maybe broiled with garlic and bread crumbs. And they were horrible.”

But as European taste has shaped American restaurant menus, and as cultivated mussels have become big business in New Zealand and Prince Edward Island, mussel dishes have become more common. Most of the mussels on the market are rope-raised, from one of those two places: the greenlip mussels from New Zealand are imported frozen, and P.E.I. mussels may be frozen or fresh, though the fresh ones are likely to be at least 4 days out of the water, Mr. Brayton said.

He also said there is a gap in the market for fresh East Coast mussels that Maine’s fledgling mussel businesses will try to fill. Some producers have already begun selling their most expensive mussels as “bouchots,” though they have never seen a wooden post: they are farmed on rafts in deep water and spend the whole of their short lives under water. But they are harvested young, and since their meat is small and tender, they have been tagged as delicacies.

“You know how microgreens are supposed to be sweeter, and more delicate, and so on?” asked Sam Hayward, a chef in Portland, Me., whose wood-roasted mussels at Fore Street Restaurant are a single-dish public relations campaign for the long-neglected mussel. “Well, these bouchots are like micromussels.”

But smaller isn’t necessarily better: it’s how, when and where the mussel was grown that gives it flavor, something to consider when shopping. If the shells are cracked, that’s an indication that the mussels were harvested too young; if they are gaping open, they have been out of the water too long.

At shellfish markets in Charente-Maritime, a few mussels are always opened and arranged on top of the slippery blue-black heap, so that shoppers can inspect the flesh. The most flavorful mussels are orange-fleshed, indicating a mature female; pale beige ones are males and immature females.

Mr. Hayward prefers large, meaty mussels with thicker shells for his dish, which comes off the menu when he can’t get good ones. He puts a lump of butter compounded with almonds, garlic, pepper and drops of lemon juice in a paella pan, tosses a pound or so of mussels on top, and slides the whole thing into his wood-fired oven.

“If you put one of those baby mussels in a 900-degree oven, the shell just cracks apart instantly,” he said. “And the flavor isn’t there.” When it comes out, the aromatic, caramelized butter mixes with the juices that pool under the mussels to make a dish that diners have been known to order two or three times in one sitting.

Wild mussels, Mr. Hayward’s favorites, aren’t practical for restaurant service, he said. And the Gulf of Maine’s intertidal zone, which contains the most nutrients and oxygen for shellfish, is mostly off limits for aquaculture to protect its delicate ecosystem, he said.

“But there’s no substitute for that rich protein soup in the intertidal zones,” he said. “That’s what makes mussels really happy.”