Mussels love Puglia et vice versa

Saturday is market day in Ostuni, and what a market! All week we planned to attend and buy lunch there, then go home and stay in doing nothing but cooking and eating. Since the kitchen is only a six foot or so strip along side of the big main room, I reasoned that we would make, eat, clean and repeat our way through an entire Pugliese feast from the market. We started before one and ended after nine. Do you know how precious friends are to a cook who are willing to do a thing like that? Precious and rare.

This is the first course I made for our all-day-long market feast in Ostuni. I had been reading my new Pugliese cookbook, so I decided to channel a Pugliese casalinga and just cook however it happened. Once you’ve read thirty or so recipes for variations on a theme, you can usually trust yourself to put in what should go in and leave out the raspberry jam. (I love raspberry jam, but not so far with mussels.)

Because we were having antipasto, another antipasto, pasta, main dish and side dish, I didn’t make a huge first course. A half kilo, or a little over a pound, of mussels was all I bought. Considering how much of that is shell, that’s very little. And still, it served more than three people and we had a few mussel meats left for a friend. I like this. A lot. I’d have been perfectly happy with this as a one dish meal. But we are, after all, in Puglia, in Italy, and this was my one day to cook in a whole week!

Mussels with pasta Puglia style

for 3-4 as a first course or 2 as a main course

1 pound or so fresh mussels
6 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 dried peperoncini (chillies) broken or sliced
a splash of white wine
10 cherry tomatoes cut in half
a handful of basil leaves, slivered
freshly ground black pepper

150 g dried hard wheat pasta

Start the water boiling for the pasta before anything. It takes a while. When it is really boiling, add some salt and the pasta. If your pasta is to cook 10 minutes, that is just about the time it takes to cook the sauce. Otherwise, adjust the start of the mussels to agree with the pasta timing. Remember: people wait for pasta, pasta doesn’t wait for people.

Clean the mussels by removing their beards and rinsing in cold water. Don’t do this way ahead, because you want them alive for safety when they are cooked.

In a deep pot with a lid, heat the olive oil. Add the garlic and the chili pepper and saute at a low temperature until the garlic goes somewhat translucent. Add the mussels and the splash of white wine and cover the pot. Cook a few minutes until the mussels are opened. Stir them around and throw out any you find unopened.

Add the basil, the pasta and the tomatoes and barely heat them through. Ladle into pasta bowls and garnish with basil leaves. Grind black pepper over to your pleasure.

Years ago you had to live near the sea to get decent mussels. Nowadays they are one of the most reliable seafoods, grown in all the seas and eaten all around the world. They don’t eat whatever comes along, as once they did, but get clean food in drifts where they grow in strips along ropes or chains. They seem just an ideal food to me. Add to that the fact that they are pretty cheap wherever I have lived, and they rise yet another notch. If you haven’t tried them you owe yourself to do so.

I’m so enthusiastic about cozze that I am going to send this pasta post to Prest Pasta Nights, this week at Eat the Right Stuff. Go on over on Friday and see what the world is winding around its fork!