The Spirit World

A few years ago my wife and I went to Belgium to experience the beer culture there first hand. We learned a lot on that all-too-short ten day tour of Belgian pubs, breweries, and restaurants. We learned that it is okay to drink a Kasteel with your waffles at breakfast. We learned that every beer should be served in the proper glass. And, we learned that steamed mussels and pommes frites or frietten is what you have for lunch or dinner. Every sidewalk café and restaurant in Belgium seemed to have some variation on the steamed mussel theme. We also learned that if you want to steam mussels right, you have to steam them in beer, good beer — expensive beer.

You don’t have to fly to Belgium to have great steamed mussels; you can make them yourself. It’s not too hard. This is the recipe we used last time we steamed up a pot of mussels:

Mussels Steamed in Duvel

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, smashed
• 1 medium onion, roughly sliced
• 1 cup cored and chopped tomato
• 1 bottle Duvel beer
• 4 pounds mussels, well washed

The first thing you want to do is de-beard the mussels. Our fish shop de-beards them for us, which is really nice, but you might want to check all the mussels and remove anything attached to them that you don’t want to eat: gum wrappers, thumbtacks, small children, etc. Also, discard the ones with broken shells or the ones that are unusually heavy. The heavy ones are probably filled with mud and you don’t want mud in your sauce! I like to soak the mussels for a while and rinse them several times just to make sure.

Put some oil in a pot large enough to hold all the mussels and turn the heat to medium. Add the sliced onion and garlic and cook until the onion begins to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the tomato, and cook about 5 minutes more.

Add the mussels and good beer (we used Duvel, but any really good, flavorful Belgian beer will give good results) and turn the heat to high. Cover the pot and cook until the mussels open, about 10 minutes.

Use a slotted spoon to transfer the steamed mussels to a large bowl. Pour some of the cooking liquid over the mussels and serve. You might want to keep a fresh roll of French bread handy; bread is great for sopping up the beery liquid. I’ll leave the pommes frites as an exercise for the reader (or a future column which ever comes first). [A special thanks to my wife Denise who helped not only with the preparation of the mussels, but with the preparation of the recipe and directions.]