mussels with lovage, wine, tomatoes, shallot; crusty bread

A bowl of steamed mussels is one of the most satisfying one-dish meals you can place before guests, and it’s also one of the easiest. I’ve been using the same recipe for years, and I really should come up with a new one. But this one is so good, and I bring these beautiful bivalves home so seldom (I don’t know why), that there’s not much motivation to look for another.

This dish is perfect for a hot evening, since the entire process requires less that the heat (a burner on top of the stove) be on for than 5 minutes. I found the recipe in the New York Times, where it was described as adapted by Sara Dickerman from “The Herbal Kitchen,” by Jerry Traunfeld.

There are also few ingredients, with little preparation needed (what there is to do is very easy and can be done leisurely), and everything goes into the pot at once.

The mussels were fresh, and seemed just about perfect, their little shells snapped tightly closed, until they had been steamed (we didn’t lose a single one).  Also, there were almost no beards to be trimmed (apparently they were all boy mussels or pre-teens).

The tomatoes were spectacular, as I had come to expect from this farmer, over several years.

  • two and a quarter pounds of small mussels, purchased from P.E. & D.D. Seafood in the Union Square Greenmarket early that afternoon, scrubbed, and de-bearded where necessary, combined in a large heavy enameled pot (a ‘dutch oven’ in fact) with over two cups of halved cherry tomatoes from Stokes Farm that were billed, with understandable pride, ‘The Best Cherry Tomatoes’, half a cup of good white wine, a Portuguese (Alentejo) white, Esporao Alandra Branco 2016, from Garnet Wines, a few tablespoons of chopped red shallot from Norwich Meadows Farm, three and a half tablespoons of Organic Valley ‘Cultured Pasture Butter’, a generous amount of freshly-ground black pepper, and some coarsely-chopped lovage from Berried Treasures Farm, the pot covered and its contents simply steamed over high heat for a few minutes, arranged in shallow bowls, along with the wonder pot liquor, and sprinkled with a little more lovage (I didn’t include pepperoncino this time around, mostly because I forgot)
  • served with a crusty whole wheat sourdough baguette from from Runner & Stone Bakery

I set the table with bigger spoons than usual this time, to better enjoy the liquid, and that meant bringing out some larger pieces of old coin silver, for the first time (we don’t have soup very often). They’re light and thin, but quite large, which was standard for a period all-purpose spoon, unless it was to be used for stirring tea; the key is to fill them only a little each time. They were made in southern Ohio, either Cincinnati or Chillicothe, by Edward P. Pratt, almost 200 years ago. They look brand new; maybe their previous owners didn’t serve soup very often either.

There was a dessert!