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wc-Curried-Mussels-with-Sweet-Red-Pepper

What more is there to say? You look at this picture from Hors d'Oeuvres and you simply want to pluck that mussel off the page and indulge. Unfortunately, it’s only a picture. You need a trip to your fish market.

In Hors d’Oeuvres, author Gillian Duffy offers an array of appetizers from the simple to the utterly sophisticated. [You can see a full cookbook review at this link.] This is one of those sophisticated ones. And it reflects her British heritage: Indian curry married with seafood from the endless shoreline of Great Britain. Seafood could not help being a key staple for British cuisine. With their worldwide trading and colonization, the British brought home many food ideas and made them integral to their culture — and to ours. Curry, ketchup and even fish and chips are ideas that were imported, adopted and integrated.

Oh, if you had been trudging around Europe in, say, 8000 BC you would have found a very different Great Britain. At that time, the last ice age was just receding and the ice on the land surface used water that had once been in the oceans. Britain was not an island but simply a peninsula extending north from France. You could walk from France to Britain. People, plants and animal were easily exchanged.

There was still a shoreline, there still were mussels, and perhaps people were already enjoying them steamed in some crude pot. Folks were not, however, enjoying the fragrances of curry or snap of red pepper.


Curried Mussels with Sweet Red Pepper

Yield: 30 to 40 hors d’oeuvres

Ingredients:

  • 3 pounds large cultivated mussels
  • ¼ cup dry white wine
  • 2 large shallots, minced
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 3 tablespoons curry powder
  • 1 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 sweet red bell pepper, finely diced for garnish

Preparation:

Wash the mussels in cold running water and remove their beards. Allow to soak for 10 to 15 minutes in a bowl of cold water. Discard any damaged or open mussels and place remaining mussels in a large pot.

Add the white wine, shallots, butter, black pepper, and curry powder. Cover with a tight-fitting lid, and cook over medium heat. Bring the liquid to a boil, and stir well. Replace the lid and allow to cook until the mussel shells have just opened, 4 to 6 minutes. Remove the mussels and place on a platter to cool. Strain the liquid from the pot through a fine sieve into a bowl, and allow the curry broth to cool.

When they are cool, .remove the mussels from their shells, and separate each pair of shells into two halves. Wash the shells in clean water and set aside. Add ¼ to ½ cup curry broth to the mayonnaise and whip them together in a bowl. Add the mussel meat to the curry mayonnaise, mix, and spoon each mussel back into a half shell, with a little extra curry mayonnaise. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Garnish each mussel with diced red pepper just before serving.

Source: Hors d’Oeuvres by Gillian Duffy [Morrow, 1998]