Mr. Mussel, the Clean-Up Mollusc

Not everyone is going to want to read about mussels. I commiserate. They can repel. They can make some people very ill.

A bad one nearly killed my mother on holiday in Brittany. It didn’t stop her eating them at the very next opportunity, but that was not a good move on her part. Once you have been affected by any bad mollusc, you basically have to renounce them forever.

Even perfectly fresh, one consumed after a previous untoward event can overwhelm the digestive system. The body does not shut down so much as fully open up.

Still, they do deserve a hearing. These bivalves, in a class that, astonishingly, includes 30,000 species from the familiar scallops and oysters to double shells I had not heard of, are, in my (unscientifically tutored) opinion, what we need to dump en masse into our British waterways.

The wrong priorities

Mussels could solve the horrendous contamination that is a result of foreign companies being allowed to buy up Britain’s water supply and using the profits to pay massive bonuses to their directors and shareholders.

They amounted to £1.4 billion in dividends in 2022, up £540 million from the previous year, money spent that could have been used to invest in providing consumers with water pure enough to drink and to swim in.

In one year, enough raw sewage was released from 30 water treatment plants to fill 4,352 Olympic swimming pools. The state of British water is a good reflection of now-standard corporate British morality received with a what-can-you-do shrug.

We are not alone. Look at this summer’s problems in Paris faced by the Olympic organizers over the quality of the River Seine, unsafe to host swimming events on the scheduled day.

Misunderstood and underappreciated

Our waters may not be clean but contrary to popular suspicion, mussels are. Like other molluscs, both the seawater and the freshwater variety are the shellfish version of kidneys, removing waste material from water.

Oysters filter up to five litres of water an hour. Historically, the flourishing oyster population of the 4,479 square mile Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard could filter the entire water volume of that enormous estuary every three or four days. Now it is so polluted the process takes nearly one year.

Generally what mussels feed on is not what you imagine. It is a myth that they hoover up excrement — although as they scavenge the floor of the sea or river, it may be that some is incorporated in the bottom-feeding they are nicknamed for, but not enough to signify.

Nature’s little vacuum cleaners

It is plankton and other microscopic sea creatures that they predominantly consume. My view of the mussel as a potential vacuum cleaner is shared by scientists. A team led by Penelope Lindeque, an ecologist at the UK’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory, has discovered that the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) will also eat microplastics and other pollutants without causing harm to itself.

One 5kg/11lbs cluster of 300 mussels was found to filter out over 250,000 microplastics an hour. These microplastics are then expelled by the mussels and rapidly sink, making it easier to remove them from the water — even with the high buoyancy level of the particles.

The scourge of plastic waste

Eight to twelve million tons of plastic end up in the ocean annually — the equivalent of a full truckload dumped into the sea every single minute.

Still, the usefulness of mussels as clean-up machines doesn’t improve their reputation in Britain and the United States as the poor man’s shellfish, along with whelks, winkles and cockles (clams are no longer on the list) — all molluscs that are highly-prized by sensible southern Europeans.

Leading the way

In Europe, the Spanish lead the way in mussel cultivation, although the Chinese, wouldn’t you know, account for 40% of global production.

In North America, where mussel culture began only in the late 1970s, 80% come from Prince Edward Island in Canada.

The Spanish and Portuguese conjure remarkable stews from mussels. The Greeks and Turks fry them with herbs. But it is the French who truly celebrate them, with mussel farms out to sea where they grow on bouchots, thick ropes, along the Normandy and Brittany coast, as well as down south in Bouzigues and Sète.

A myriad of recipes

We are all familiar with Moules Marinière and possibly Moules à la Bordelaise with its tomato puree-flavored sauce. But there are many versions of “mouclade,” a mussel stew said to originate in the Saintonge region of the Charente-Maritime on the west coast of France, where “moucle” is the Saintonge word for mussel.

There they add to the broth egg yolks, Pineau des Charentes (a fortified sweet white wine), garlic and cream. In the Charente-Maritime’s Fouras region, curry is the flavor.

The point of any mussel stew is that mussels make an elegant, sophisticated dish from a very cheap main ingredient.

For me, the best part is the broth. But you are not always offered a spoon to slurp it up. That is because there is a method that sorts the aficionado from the novice.

Basically, you thread the pointy end of a single mussel shell onto the tines of your fork and use that as your spoon.

You already know, of course, that you are not seen as a mussel connoisseur if you use your fork to prang out the mussel meat. You should use an empty hinged mussel whose meat you’ve already picked out and eaten as the pincers with which to pinch out every next one.

Getting started

This is the most well-known and simple recipe for mussel stew. You can use it as a base for other variations, adding Pernod, cream, curry or orange zest or more.

Just be sure you clean your mussels well before you begin: You do not want sand at the bottom of your soup bowl grating against your teeth.

Give each mussel a firm scrub under a running tap, pull away the ‘beard’ and toss any with a broken or cracked shell or which remain open after you’ve given the shell a sharp tap with a knife handle.

Drop them into a big bowl of water for 10 minutes then drain and cook — the same day you’ve bought them.

Ingredients

(serves 6)

2 large yellow onions, chopped
3 shallots, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon flat-leaf parsley, chopped plus more for finishing
285ml/½ pint dry white wine
2¾kg/6lb mussels
55g/2 oz butter
120ml/4fl oz double cream (optional)
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Method

Put the first six ingredients into a large lidded pan and simmer 5-6 minutes. Add the mussels.

Stick the lid on and over medium heat leave them to steam open. Drain them through a colander into a bowl and slide them into a warmed tureen.

Pour the liquor into a saucepan and warm it up again over a medium-low heat. Whisk in the butter and cream if using, season to taste and pour over the mussels.

Sprinkle with the extra parsley and eat at once with plenty of crusty baguette and an empty central bowl for the discarded shells.