Name: Moules marinière
Yield: For 4
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 50 g butter; 2-3 glasses dry white wine; A good handful of curly parsley, finely chopped; Freshly ground black pepper; 2-3 shallots, finely chopped; 1 garlic clove, finely chopped; 2 kg mussels (avoid the pre-cleaned and pre-packed, and buy them as fresh as you can. In France, choose ‘bouchot’, the best, grown on wooden posts); 2 tablespoons sunflower oil

Preparation info

For
4

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Nobody Does it Better

By Trish Deseine

Published 2007

About

This can be a very communal dish. There is a camaraderie attached to eating moules frites, mussels steamed in wine and herbs and served with chips. At the Braderie de Lille, a huge seven-day autumn flea market that invades the entire city and is France’s largest public gathering, over 500 tonnes of mussels are consumed. Their empty shells are piled up on the pavement in front of each restaurant, in a competition to find out which place was most popular with hungry visitors.