Mussel

A flexible San Francisco favorite, finished with bright, garlicky gremolata toasts for soaking up the saucy broth.

This flexible recipe is all you need to bring this iconic Provençal seafood stew to your table.

The mussels here add their beautiful, briny juices into the curry, which turn this into a stunning and spectacular dish.

This mussel chowder is both comforting in winter and well-suited for summer, given its straight-from-the-ocean brine that gets a lift from fresh lime and cilantro.

This is an ingenious one-pot dish where the pasta is cooked in the richly spiced broth, so there’s no need to boil it beforehand.

In this date-night meal, mussels and clams get tangled up in strands of nutty buckwheat noodles soaking in a briny, garlicky, and ever-so-slightly-spicy broth.

For the best version of this mussel curry, use fresh mussels, not frozen mussels on the half shell.

This delicately spiced mussel soup uses the bivalves at their very best, when they’re plump and filled with flavour. The curry powder, chutney and raita give the soup a scent of the warm sub-continent, in the depths of dreary January.

Other quick-cooking shellfish, such as mussels or medium shelled shrimp, can be substituted for the clams, but you might need an extra splash of pasta water to loosen the sauce.

Topping fried bread with brothy mussels, beans, and tomatoes turns it into a hearty knife-and-fork dinner.

You can use any Pilsner in this recipe, but a Mexican Pilsner will go best with the chorizo. Serve with a nice green salad to round out the meal.

Rasam, as prepared in most homes in Southern India, uses either tamarind or tomatoes as the base. It is a piquant broth poured over steaming hot rice. In our home—both in Kerala and America—rasam was a staple part of everyday meals. One night when I was a teenager, I was out to dinner with my brother Tom in New York City’s Little Italy and ate mussels cooked in a light tomato broth very reminiscent of rasam. I couldn’t wait to get home, buy fresh mussels, and cook them in rasam. This dish has made its rounds in my kitchens for close to three decades now. Make sure to have some fresh crusty bread to soak up the tomato-mussel broth.

Mussels steam in the same saucepan as chili-and-fennel-spiced tomato sauce in this effortless supper.

These mussels get their depth of flavor from store-bought pesto—a great convenience product available at most grocery stores.

This classic Spanish dish comes together in a snap when cooked on a baking sheet.

In every good restaurant kitchen, there's a combination of thrift and innovation. We always have a dish like this chowder on the menu because when we portion fish for main courses, there are inevitably some pieces of our excellent, sushi-quality fish too small to serve on their own. And that is another great reason to buy your fish whole: not only can you save the bones and head for fish stock, but you'll be generating two meals from one shopping trip. We call it chowder to give the idea of a hearty, chunky fish soup (sea bass, shrimp, mussels) with a lot of texture from vegetables. Our version shows off kabocha squash and ají dulce peppers. These are specific varieties of squash and pepper that I search for at the Greenmarket for their deep flavor and beautiful aroma. If you can't find these, use another variety of squash and mild pepper.

You don’t often see recipes for seafood pastas that incorporate vegetables other than the occasional chopped tomato, but broccoli adds a lot of body, color, and substance to this pasta dish. I love broccoli, but if you don’t, feel free to substitute your favorite green vegetable. It’s a great quick, elegant meal.

Steaming a pot of shellfish is actually quite simple—and quick. It requires just a small amount of aromatic liquid, such as the wine used in the recipe below, which imparts flavor to the shellfish while also mixing with the flavorful liquid released from the shellfish, resulting in a delicious broth. And the shells serve as a “steamer basket,” keeping the shellfish from being submerged in the liquid. A dry white wine is used as the steaming liquid; other good choices would be beer or water (you could even forgo adding liquid and steam the mussels in a covered pot until they open, as they have enough liquid in their shells, then sprinkle with salt and pepper). Here some aromatics are sautéed before the liquid is added to enhance its flavor before adding the mussels. In Belgium and France, mussels are traditionally accompanied by piping hot French Fries (page 333), but a crusty loaf of bread is always welcome.

What I like most about this mussels preparation is that they are not simply steamed in white wine, like the vast majority of mussels you see in restaurants. We cook them with a light tomato sauce—and, yes, also white wine—and toss in piles of herbs after the mussels are cooked, so the herbs wilt only slightly. The finished dish manages to be original and familiar at the same time. It also couldn’t be easier to make.