Ingredients: 2 large handfuls of fish bones, skins, heads; best from sole, turbot, salmon. 2 onions, 2 tomatoes, 1 leek, 2 carrots, 1 piece of celery, 2 cloves of garlic, ½ bottle dry white wine, 1 tsp thyme, bay leaf, cayenne pepper, salt, 6 tbsp olive oil, 2 cups sweet cream, 1 kg mussels ("Bouchots"), 2 tbsp chopped parsley, white bread.
Clean and chop the vegetables; wash the fish parts. In a large pot, heat the oil and sauté the vegetables and fish parts. Add minced garlic, thyme, bay leaf and salt. Fill half with white wine, half with water, so that the contents are just covered. Cover, bring to a boil and simmer for about ½ hour, which is enough. Pour everything through a sieve (a pointed sieve is best because it fits the most) into another pot, squeezing everything well with the back of a soup ladle.
Meanwhile, place the brushed, wet mussels (discard any that are open) in a pot, put a lid on and give it the highest heat so the mussels open quickly. After 3 minutes, pour the mussels into a colander, catching the mussel water. Wait a moment - the sand will settle - and carefully pour the liquid into the fish stock; remove the mussels (now discard those that have not opened) from their shells and keep warm. Heat the fish stock, stir in the cream, season with salt and cayenne, add the mussels, sprinkle with the chopped parsley and serve with slices of toasted white bread.
Éclade
Cleaned, washed mussels are spread out on a plank of olive wood and covered tightly with dry pine needles. The needles are set on fire, and when they turn to ash, the mussels are cooked and very aromatic. They are eaten hot with farmhouse bread and butter, and wine is drunk heartily with them.
Éclade, a dish from the French Atlantic coast (Charente-Maritime), is well suited to a late summer picnic near a fir or pine forest. It can also be prepared in a simpler way:
Ingredients: 2 kg mussels, 1 bucket dry pine needles, 1 large round wooden board
Wash mussels thoroughly, discard any that have been opened, drain the rest. First, arrange five mussels in the center of the board, pointing forward, in rosette fashion. Now carefully insert the next row of mussels into the spaces between them. Make sure that the mussels are firmly pinned together. Continue in this way until the plate looks like a rose with many leaves. Now cover the shells pyramid-like with the very dry pine needles and set the needles on fire. The pine needles will burn to ash, crackling and fragrant, in about 8 minutes. The shells are ready. They remain closed and still contain the mussel juice. Served with sturdy country bread, salted butter and a strong Gros Plant from the Loire.
With Waldemar Thomas at Mussel Laudigeois in Frankfurt.
Miesmuscheln, the "Oysters of the little man", are of course not lousy mussels. Their name is derived from "moss", which reminds us of the thin threads that the mussels use to cling to all kinds of surfaces. They especially like to cling to piles, which is why they are also called pile mussels. The use of the most important edible kind of mussel was recognized already early, a quite exactly delivered history tells, how one came on it to make oneself the blue-violet shell animals constantly useful, to breed them.
It was in the year 1290, when it the Irish traveler Patrick Walton as a castaway to the French Atlantic coast with La Rochelle had verschlagen. There he eked out a living as a fowler and one day observed that the stakes he had set up in the shallows to secure the fishing nets were covered with shells, which were great to eat. He connected the stakes with braided branches to invite more mussels to settle. From these beginnings, the French mussel farming of today developed on the Norman and Breton coasts. It was precisely this braiding that gave the smallest and finest of the mussels their name: bouchots.
Shellfish, it used to be said, were only eaten in the months with a "r" in their name, i.e. in the cooler months of the year, which surely had something to do with the inadequate refrigeration facilities. So they are in season now, and certainly mussels are now available at Frankfurt's best fishmonger, René Laudigeois on the Kleinmarkthalle gallery.
However, it can sometimes happen that you can only buy bouchots, and not the usual, larger and usually cheaper mussels from the North Sea, Monsieur Laudigeois explains. This is because their stocks are overfished in some years, and since the mussels take sixteen months to grow large and edible, they are then scarce. The few that would still be traded then are more expensive than bouchots; in normal times the reverse is true. These are then bad times for the popular "Muscheln auf rheinische Art", which, with bread, butter and top-fermented beer, represent for many the culinary highlight of early autumn.
Small and delicate as bouchots are, they are ideally suited to Norman mussel soup, which also graces a festive table.
If you are one of the devotees of experiential gastronomy and happen to be the owner of a pine grove and a plank made from the wood of an olive tree, you will probably be more interested in Éclade.
Fish and sea creatures
René Laudigeois
Kleinmarkthalle (Gallery)
60311 Frankfurt am Main
Phone: 069-291925
Closed Mon; open Tue to Fri 8am-6pm, Sat 8am-3pm
from Waldemar Thomas