mussels: lowest effort for highest reward
good for you, good for the planet, good for happiness
Because it’s July and it’s hot, both my body and Bite into this have been on an irregular summer schedule. If I ever charge for this newsletter, perhaps the financial incentive will be enough to hold me to account. Until then, you’ll get peach erotica and jam organic chemistry and party advice whenever I feel like it. Today, we’ve got an ode to seafood littered with tidbits on climate change that will interest even you quirky yet lovable vegan/vegetarian readers.
Every time I buy seafood from the fish market on the Wharf, I accidentally acquire about double the amount any human could reasonably consume.
The first time, it was a Monday night. It was raining. A crab feast was in the offing. Maryland blue crabs had been discussed, fantasized about, dreamed of for months. Ten people had been invited. Brown paper and plastic tablecloths had been purchased. Old aluminum pots had been scrubbed.
With friend of the newsletter Steven, we drove to the Wharf in the dark and the wet. The “Jessie Taylor Seafood” banner was brightly lit through the grey, the long row of slanting steel pans overflowing with scuttling crustaceans glowing from afar. Five or six men in aprons announced our arrival with shouts. We were the only people as far as the eye could see.
The walk back to the car was a painful one, Steven and I clutching either end of a massive box and barely holding it aloft, dripping and struggling to maintain our hold as our cargo clicked and scuttled. Theoretically a bushel of crabs weighs forty pounds — this weighed more.
How did we end up with at least fifty pounds of crabs, you might be wondering? We had shown up to Jessie Taylor Seafood on a rainy Monday night, something no sane person would do. The seafood men (as I call them in my head) were bored, and I was excited and full of questions. The crabs were going to waste. We paid for half a bushel and left with more than double that weight.
In the end, the evening was gluttonous feast that first brought joy and then, honestly, horror. The crabs were so numerous that they required steaming in batches. Some made furious scuttling escape attempts. A few naive friends shrieked upon entering the kitchen to the site of an angrily waving crab aloft above a pot, clutching desperately to the tongs. Piles of crabs were dumped onto the table and devoured, then dumped again. By the third dump, the devouring had slowed to a lackadaisical picking, a half-hearted acceptance. By the fourth, all but two brave men had tapped out.
I fell asleep groaning quietly to myself that night, my body unfamiliar with such a large influx of crustacean flesh. The whole house smelled of crab for days. The leftover shelled meat was cooked into breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week before we gave up on what remained.
It’s been nearly a year since that night, and it will probably be nearly another before the ill effects have faded enough to make it worth repeating.
What I did repeat this weekend was a trip to Jessie Taylor Seafood, this time on a sweltering moist Saturday evening. In July, the mingled odor of fresh, cooking, and decomposing fish clings to the wet summer air on the wharf, somehow not entirely unpleasant. The plan was to choose fish for a grilled dinner, and though we were tempted by the whole salmons, large enough for six, and the oysters, at 50 cents a pop, we landed instead on the simplest — the mussels. It was late, they were cheap, and I’ll take any excuse to enjoy the fact that my boyfriend also adores the most superior of bivalves.
We paid $22 for three bags of mussels, which felt excessive but not inappropriate, and home we went, the bag perhaps a bit heavier than you would expect for dinner for two.
Only when it came time to clean and steam our acquisitions did we discover that we had accidentally purchased six pounds. Some context: One pound of mussels per person is a normal serving. Two pounds, excessively generous. Three pounds means falling asleep groaning. Who would think that six pounds of mussels could go for $22, in this age of regular inflation and additional bougie city people inflation? It was starting to feel like Jessie Taylor Seafood was a curse disguised as a bounteous blessing.
But unlike the crab incident, this meal did not end in horror. Sure, we accidentally undercooked the top layer by overfilling the pot. Sure, a few were sandier than they would have been if we’d bought luxurious quality ones from somewhere with luxurious prices.
But while crabs actually battle for life when you cook them, and demand more than ten minutes in a pot, and require effort to shell when they’re done, mussels are the simplest of meals to prepare. For me, they have a higher reward:effort ratio than any other dinner I know how to cook. If you put a few pounds of mussels in a pot with some butter, shallots, garlic, and white wine,1 cover them, shake them, and let them cook for ten minutes, you will have an incandescent meal. You could throw in a can of diced tomatoes and some chopped up parsley.2 You could replace the wine with beer.
Slice up a baguette to dip in the juices that leak from the shells when they open, drink the wine you cooked with, feast. The whole operation takes fifteen minutes, and the resulting bread dipped in mussel juice might be one of the most delightful things you’ll ever make for yourself.
Usually a delicious food has some kind of downside. Meat: Generally bad for carbon emissions and for long-term heart health. Fish: Better for health, but loaded with scary environmental consequences from overfishing, pollution, drag nets, or nutrient runoff from fish farms. Slavery and forced labor is rife in the fishing and seafood processing supply chain, especially for shrimp. I still eat meat and seafood, making me and every other relatively well-off liberal who doesn’t doggedly pursue some form of vegetarianism a bit of a hypocrite, but I’m realistic. I make choices with my buying power and appetite that average in favor of less meat and fish, or more expensive meat and fish with a supply chain I can trace.3 I’m not going to restrict my primary source of joy and delight in the world when it will have very little positive long-term societal impact.
If that pisses you off, well, the only advice I can give is to stop reading this newsletter.
This was not a digression. If you’re looking to feel good about yourself and enjoy a fish-laden meal at the same time, bivalves are a great bet. Beds of mussels actually aid in the preservation and creation of coastal ecosystems that can protect shorelines from severe storms. They can filter pollution from water and even lower water temperatures.
They’re also one of the best sources of protein for your health and for the climate. One serving of mussels provides about the same amount of complete protein as a serving of steak, though mussels convert the rotting detritus and bacteria they eat into protein far more efficiently than cows convert grass or grain. (If we ignore the added benefits of ecosystem support and pollution filtering for mussels, on carbon dioxide alone chicken produces nearly triple the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per kilogram of edible product than mussels. Beef is so much more polluting that it is literally off the charts in this very nice chart).
A general rule of thumb, if you care about the impact of your food choices and don’t want to be a vegetarian: The simpler the organism, the better the protein-to-energy expenditure ratio. Even when compared to large fish like tuna, low food-chain fish always provide more energy for less consumption. The only other seafoods with similar attributes are small fish like sardines, and while I love sardines far more than the next person, they can’t compete with mussels for general joy.
Everyone should be eating more mussels. Everyone should be eating more farmed bivalves in general.
One final note. If you have children, I can promise that mussels are enchanting if you’re fed them before you know what they are. I apparently threw tantrums at Sunday brunch awaiting the arrival of mussels, well before I can remember eating things or going to Sunday brunch. I have no memory of my first mussel, I’ve just allowed loved them.
Restaurant notes this week
Market Lunch, best crab cake in the city: Eastern Market. Speaking of crabs, the crab cakes actually blew me away they were so full of large hunks of fatty crab meat. I’ve never had a crab cake that was less pulverized/blended and more crab chunk.
Lei Musubi, sticky luscious rice balls: This pop up restaurant might actually serve the single most delicious premade food thing you can buy in this city. The “OG” spam musubi is something I look forward to every weekend and might one day merit a whole newsletter’s worth of writing. You can find their pop-up schedule here.
To close us out for the week, a picture of the Musubi…
I wish I had more than the most basic knowledge about wine, but I go for a $12 bottle of dry sauvignon blanc because I think it tastes good when cooked with shellfish. If you’re reading this and have thoughts about better wines for cooking into seafood and simultaneously drinking, I would love those thoughts.
Yet another plug for the Joy of Cooking, which has some epic and simple recipes for steamed mussels, plus great advice for cooking and cleaning all types of shellfish.
The Seafood Watch website is a great resource, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The site ranks every seafood you can buy, both farmed and wild-caught, from everywhere in the world, based upon environmental and human labor impact. Notably, the “Avoid” section for the Mussels buying guide literally just says “We hope you enjoy the mussels,” that’s how good mussels are for the world.