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There is no better introduction to a seaside town than its fish market. Arrive early, while the ice is still crisp and the harbour wall is slick with the night's tide, and you will find mussels at their best: heavy, tight-shelled and smelling cleanly of the sea rather than of the bucket they travelled in.
Look for mussels that are closed, or that close when you tap them. A slightly open shell is fine if it shuts against your fingernail; one that hangs loose and refuses to move has gone. Discard anything cracked, chipped or unusually light — a light mussel is an empty one. The shells should be wet but not slimy, and the meat inside should be a plump apricot or deep orange rather than grey.
Rope-grown mussels from Scottish sea lochs, Cornish estuaries and the Menai Strait tend to be cleaner than shore-gathered ones, with thinner shells and sweeter meat. Expect to buy about 700g per person if mussels are the whole supper, or 500g if you are serving them with plenty of bread and something afterwards. A kilo of cooked mussels yields roughly 400g of edible meat, so buy generously — nobody has ever regretted too many.
Ask the seller when they were landed. If the answer is "this morning", buy more than you planned.
Mussels are live shellfish and they do not enjoy a warm car. Take a cool bag, or ask for a bag of ice to sit alongside them. Once home, tip them into a bowl in the fridge — not sealed in plastic, which suffocates them — and cook them the same day if you can, certainly within twenty-four hours.
Cleaning takes ten minutes and a certain meditative pleasure:
Never soak mussels in fresh water for hours in the hope of purging sand. It kills them and does nothing useful.
This is a supper for two or three, ready in under fifteen minutes once the chopping is done. It works just as well in a Cornish kitchen as in a flat a hundred miles inland, but it tastes best eaten within sight of water.
You will need: 1.5kg prepared mussels, 30g butter, 2 banana shallots finely chopped, 2 garlic cloves sliced thin, 300ml dry cider, 100ml double cream, a small glass of white wine if you have one open, a handful of flat-leaf parsley chopped, black pepper, and good bread.
Melt the butter in your largest saucepan — one with a tight-fitting lid, and big enough that the mussels fill it no more than two-thirds. Soften the shallots and garlic over a low heat for five minutes without colouring them; you want sweetness, not caramel.
Pour in the cider and raise the heat. Let it bubble hard for two minutes, then tip in the mussels all at once and clamp on the lid. Steam for four to six minutes, shaking the pan once halfway. That is all the cooking they need. Anything longer turns them to rubber.
Lift the lid and check: the shells should be wide open and the meat firm. Any that stay shut go straight in the bin. Stir through the cream and parsley off the heat, grind over plenty of black pepper, and taste before adding salt — the liquor is often salty enough already.
Tip everything into one deep bowl in the middle of the table, or divide between warm bowls with the broth ladled over. The broth is the point: thin enough to drink, rich enough to demand bread. A sourdough loaf torn apart, a dish of salted butter, and an empty bowl for shells is the whole table setting.
To drink, stay with dry cider — the same one you cooked with — or a crisp Muscadet or dry English white. Something with acidity cuts the cream beautifully. If you want a non-alcoholic option, a cold sparkling water with lemon does the job better than anything sweet.
Finger bowls, or simply a jug of warm water and a tea towel, are not fussy. They are essential.
What makes this dish worth travelling for is the timing. Mussels are at their finest in the colder months — the old rule about months containing an R still holds, largely because summer spawning leaves them thin and milky. A blustery October weekend in a harbour town, with the boats pulled up and the wind pushing spray over the wall, is peak mussel season.
Buy from the market in the morning, walk the coastal path in the afternoon, and cook them that evening while the tide turns. If you are on a boat, they steam perfectly on a two-burner stove; the pan does not care whether it is level. Take a bag of shallots and a small bottle of cider aboard and you have supper sorted for a fraction of what a quayside restaurant would charge.
That, in the end, is coastal living at its most straightforward: a paper bag of shellfish, a hot pan, and the salty taste of the town you are standing in.
The Cobalt Quay shares practical, down-to-earth guidance on uk coastal living, boating and seaside travel for readers across the UK.
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