Mussel Beach

By Marina Wolf

TODAY’S THE DAY. You can see it in the pale blue sky, you can smell it in the thin late-winter air. You’ve already picked up the fishing license, checked the tide tables online, called about possible bacterial quarantines. You snagged an old pickle bucket from the grocery store in anticipation of your haul. The universe is perfectly aligned to sharpen your appetite for wild mussels. You want them so fresh that you can taste a little grit.

For that you have to hunt them yourself.

On a whim, you and your girlfriend pull over at a fish and tackle shop. Inside, a fresh-faced young woman preps the sandwich counter. She looks as though she’s been wandering the beaches since she washed ashore as a merbaby. She knows where the starfish dance, where the surf is perfect, where the big rocks let you have sex or a bonfire or both without anybody seeing. And yes, she knows where the good mussels are.

Following her directions, you head up the coastal highway for a few miles and pull over at the one conspicuously unmarked beach. Out on the sand, the sun bounces off the waves and warms your skin right away. The tastes of sweat and brine collect on your upper lip. Around a smaller patch of sand on the other side of the rocks, you see the tell tale chalky blue of dried mussel shells above the tide line.

This is the place. …

Pulling the mussels off of their perch is always a struggle. The little strands, or beards, that attach them to the rock are just elastic enough that they seem to break reluctantly. Sometimes, when the mussel just won’t let go, you leave it. It has won the battle. The first time you went out, four years ago, you felt bad about tearing the shellfish away from their home. But then you realized that if you want mussels, someone has to do the uprooting, someone has to keep tugging against the dumb stubbornness.

The collecting is further complicated by razor-sharp barnacles that poke out like crusty fingers among the blue-black mussels. You used to think that the barnacles were a sort of sea disease, or a chemical reaction between a ship hull and seawater, like rust. But barnacles are actual creatures, tender slugs outside of their razor-sharp shells. There’s clearly a symbiotic relationship between barnacles and mussels. The barnacles seem to guard vulnerable gaps between the mussels, which in turn protect the soft barnacle flesh, at least until a determined gatherer breaks the chain.

As you wander among the rocks, a honeymooning couple pauses in their romantic stroll to watch you in amazement. “Are those good eatin’?” the woman asks doubtfully. There’s always some couple from the heartland that cannot believe what you are doing. You laugh to yourself about the stories they must carry back: “Well, Maryanne, you wouldn’t believe what those Californians do! They pull things right off the rocks and eat them!”

AFTER AN HOUR or so, you have 60 or 70 mussels, enough for a real feed for two. Before you clamber back over the rocks, you tap the mussels that are open to make sure they’re still alive. Most of them shut, slowly. The ones that don’t respond you throw back into the surf. On the way back you stumble across the honeymooners, making out in a little cove that isn’t quite isolated enough for their purpose (obviously they didn’t talk to the fishing-shack mermaid).

Back home, you wash the mussels in a tap-water bath. They’re all closed up tight, no surprise. As nasty as seawater is to us freshwater-drinking mammals, so must a basin of tap water be truly vile to these creatures who have lived in the crashing surf all their lives.

The cooking medium is a big pan with two to three inches of liquid. The books say wine or water; you think the leftover of last night’s champagne is a fair interpretation. A pat of butter, a bay leaf. You heat the fluid to a boil and spoon the mussels in, then cover and cook for about five minutes. The mussels are done when their shells all crack open.

Setting the table for this meal is easy: the tray heaped with mussels, a pan for the shells, plates to drip over, two little cups of melted butter seething with crushed garlic, plates to drip over. A loaf of crusty sourdough, bought on the way home. The broth from the pan you ladle out to drink on the side.

Forks lie idle at the side of the plates. This feast is for the fingers: rip the bread, pry open the shells, pull out the lipped orange flesh and extract the beards, then dip them in the garlicky butter. The dull orange flesh is tender and rich, melting together with the butter in your mouth.

Your girlfriend shells half a dozen at once and throws them all into her butter–“to swim around in”–then lays them out one by one on pieces of bread. Your chins get shiny from the butter. An old chardonnay from the fridge washes down the briny mouthfuls until your plates are empty and the shell pan is full.

Sigh …

From the March 4-10, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Zine Scene

By Marina Wolf

I’M BORED with glossy food magazines. Oh, I still subscribe to Food & Wine and let my eyes drift across the food section at the local newsstand. But lately I’ve been fighting off a certain overwhelmed world-weariness, the inevitable result of constant exposure to the glare of slick pages, the whirl of globetrotting gourmands. I’ve got altitude sickness in reaction to high prices, attitude sickness in reaction to high noses.

Then recently I stumbled across a lovely piece archived in the Electronic Gourmet about food newsletters by Lynn Kerrigan. After putting a check in the mail for her catalog, A Smorgasbord of Cooks’ Periodicals, I ended up sending away for enough sample copies to curve the spines of a squadron of mail carriers. The thin little periodicals that came in response renewed my desire to keep reading about eating.

Quite a few food newsletters exist–Kerrigan counts more than 80 in her most recent catalog–but they are published in obscurity, and marketed and distributed in a way that could be called labyrinthine if it were more organized. As a result they can be disconcertingly ephemeral; Kerrigan doesn’t even bind the Smorgasbord anymore because the list changes so frequently. And yet, these newsletters constitute the most exciting body of food literature available today. Of course, there will always be a place in my heart for the kings of the genre–Bon Appetit, Saveur, Fine Cooking. But it is up to newsletters to present an alternate culinary reality.

For starters, food newsletters are personal, almost iconoclastic. They may be written by a team, but the 8- or 16-page format, usually illustrated with quirky clip art, retains the flavor of some lone individual bent over the keyboard or stove. The first-person perspective is implicit. Many of them emerged from a personal discovery or experience: a spouse’s heart attack (The Gorgeless Gourmet), for example, or life on the back lines of the restaurant industry (Chew from Madison, Wisc.). Other newsletters offer more explicit reminiscences woven among the recipes, interviews, and the address of the Idaho Potato Commission. But whether fueled by underlying motivation or blow-by-blow experience, these intensely personal tracts make it seem entirely appropriate, for example, to recount the specifics of one’s sad dining-out experiences (Convivium) in all their depressing detail, or to lavish 500 words on building a dug-out earthen kitchen, following the example of infantry soldiers in the Civil War (Food History News).

That passion is something that the conventional gourmet glossies can only dream of. Being products of a team effort, mandated by the marketing directives of a corporation, magazines lack the energy behind one person’s desire. Sure, they satisfy the basic needs of the widest number of readers, but even that seems incidental at times to channeling product information. The slick photos stir up lust for stoves, dishware, curtains, and truffle oil, while the captions tell where, when, and at what cost you can satiate that lust. Advertising cameos of cars, vacation spots, and watches put in more plugs for the good life. The pressure to consume pervades the ostensible message of good eating, which leaves passion to dry out on a slate-topped counter under the relentless blaze of the photographer’s lights.

Newsletter writers, on the other hand, get to keep that passion and combine it with love of words, supplying their readers with compelling and literate prose that is rarely found in mainstream magazines. The writing is eloquent and thoughtful (Edward Behr’s The Art of Eating), or bright and schwingy (in the irresistibly retro Hungover Gourmet), or just plain earnest (The Wild Food Adventurer).

COLLECTIVELY, the newsletter genre ends up covering a much wider range of writing styles and topics than you will ever find in the mainstream. Newsletter authors are the voice of their individual efforts, so they don’t have to do anything. They can go off on a literate rant about legalizing pot (as did editor Johann Mathieson of Food Words, a catalog/newsletter out of Portland), or indulge in genteel snipery about clueless volunteers at soup kitchens (featured in the holiday issue of the Yountville-based Curmudgeon’s Home Companion).

Newsletters don’t really need to worry about offending: most don’t have ads (which is why some of them cost as much or more than a glossy magazine). Anyway, since the writing is so personal, the objects of the writing rarely assume such importance that brand names and prices are needed. As John Thorne points out in a recent issue of Simple Cooking, it doesn’t matter what brand of ramen you buy as long as you know that Vietnamese noodles are best.

All the writers have their own little tricks and tips, but only a rare few opinionated souls care enough to write them down, offering a different view of the dominant culinary culture, like comments scribbled in the margins of society’s cookbook. Food newsletters can stretch our consciousness beyond the newest roast-goat variation of some remote Moroccan tribe into a whole new realm of interpersonal discourse: What do you like to talk about at the dinner table? What interests you in the kitchen cupboards of your friends? What was the last good dessert you had, and who fed it to you spoonful by loving spoonful? What are the food habits that you would never have the guts to share with a thousand strangers on a mailing list? Hmph, you say. Even I could write that down.

Well, go ahead. That’s what newsletters–zines of the food culture–are all about.

To receive a copy of Lynne Kerrigan’s thorough list, A Smorgasbord of Cooks’ Periodicals, send $6.95 to Food Writer, P.O. Box 156, Spring City, PA 19475-0156.

From the February 25-March 3, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.