Name: Mussels with Sausage Sauce (Moules farçies au gras)
Yield: Serves 4–6
Cuisine: France
Ingredients: 100 g lardons or bacon (poitrine fumée) cut into small dice; 2 large tomatoes, skinned, deseeded and chopped; 2 tsp tomato purée; 1 clove garlic; salt, pepper; 2 eggs, beaten; 100 g yesterday’s bread made into breadcrumbs; 2 onions, finely chopped; bunch flat parsley, chopped; 4 tbsp olive oil; 200 ml white wine; 2 kg mussels, cleaned, beards removed; 400 g sausage-meat

Preparation info

Serves
4–6

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Sud de France

By Caroline Conran

Published 2012

About

This rich dish is very popular in the coastal villages of Languedoc and I have based my recipe on a version recommended by the Association de Femmes du Bassin de Thau (their equivalent of the Women’s Institute). I have also seen one which claims the recipe’s origins to be the ‘cowboys’ of southern Tuscany. They ask you to tie up each mussel with thread to keep the stuffing in, but that is very fiddly and in any case I think it tastes more succulent when some of it is allowed to escape into