A Paradocs Abroad

The mussels on the market are terrific at the moment. This meal was a recollection, and a redemption...

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A starter of green beans cooked using the "French Bean System"^*, a kilo of mussels, Breton sel de mer butter, garlic, la flute gana country bread, and a bottle of Aligoté white burgundy. Mmmm!

The Recollection: On our last night in France on our cycle tour in 1987, we bought a kilo of mussels, some butter, some garlic, a baguette, and a bottle of Loire muscadet. We sat outside our tent in a campsite near Roscoff, and alternated steaming mussels, and heating the increasingly sharp garlic butter on our single burner stove. We ate mussels, nibbled on bread, and sipped wine from plastic cups as the sun went down. It's a meal that we remember easily and often nearly 20 years later.

The Redemption: My most disappointing meal (not that it was bad in comparison to some of the meals I've had in, oh, Whatcom County, for instance...) since coming to France this summer was one evening in August in one of the restaurants in town. They had moules frîtes on the specials blackboard out front, and so we ordered them. I don't know if it was the time of year, or a mistake in the kitchen, but most of the mussels were sort of exploded all over the inside of their shells. Watching a guy at another table, I concluded that the best way to eat them was to sort of lick them out of the shells - not quite was I was expecting. Tonight's mussels were a totally different story - big, juicy, and perfectly formed. Susan steamed them to perfection.

^*The URL for the "French Bean System" contans a space character that I can't seem to get encoded properly in this post. If you're interested, try Googling "green beans french system specialflavors.com", and it should be the 1st hit.