An Edible Memory: Eclade de Moules

Prince Edward Island mussels cooked in straw

Here in the first days of the darkest month, I was all set to write a simple post to update you all on my search for the elusive Cara Cara orange and our successful experimentation at Thanksgiving with candy roaster pies. 

Then, on Saturday night at dusk, Donna Campbell and I arrived at a potluck dinner for about 20 close friends, all Baby Boomers, who, thirty-some years ago, would have been arriving with bowls of lentils, tabouli, tofu, and copious amounts of garlic bread and special brownies.  Now that we are reaching retirement age, however, the casseroles that came in were elaborate–of the sort prescribed by Saveur and Bon Appétit, involving quinoa, asparagus and pastry, chile cheese grits, and beautifully shaved beets, topped with cilantro.  One couple had spent the whole night before slow cooking a sumptuous Boston butt, basted every two hours. 

But we arrived just in time to witness the opening act, the preparation of a very special dish–Éclade de Moules–or fresh mussels cooked under pine needles. The esteemed (pun intended) investigative journalist Joe Neff and his partner, Karen Otsea, a reproductive health care expert, were the appetizer chefs.  The mussels came from Prince Edward Island via Costco.  Joe assured us they had been pulled fresh from the water only three days before. 

As you may know, P.E.I. mussels are generally cultured in their native Canadian habitat, suspended beneath the surface of the sea on long ropes or “socks."  These cultivated mussels come out cleaner and only require a bit of scrubbing and picking to remove the black bits of "beard” that the mollusks produce to anchor themselves on rocks (or socks) in roiling ocean waters.

Aquaculture experts have been working in recent years to develop mussel seed stock that is strong enough to resist predators and to hold their own on these vertical ropes through the harvest process. As with farmed oysters, the environmental impact of this kind of shellfish farming is minimal. A Canadian government website explains that mussels “are filter feeders and eat by pumping and filtering water through gill filaments that filter out small particles. Blue mussels grow for 18 to 24 months, depending on location, water temperature and the availability of plankton for feed. The average market-size blue mussel is harvested when it reaches between 5.5 to 6 centimetres." 

Farmed mussels from Prince Edward Island have accounted for about 80 percent of Canada’s crop in the last five years, and mussels are the leading shellfish produced by our northern neighbors.  (Why am I telling you this?  Because in the December chapter of my book due out from UNC Press in 2018, we documented North Carolina’s recent efforts to cultivate oysters and to build back our own historically important shellfish industry.)

But back to this French cooking ritual involving pine needles. 

Before our arrival Joe and Karen had already meticulously assembled dozens of mussels, hinged side up and huddled close, in concentric circles on a round tabletop that had been used for this purpose before. The charred, inch-thick wafer of wood is normally soaked in water beforehand and was now resting on two sawhorses that had been set in the middle of the stone patio in the front yard. Joe and Karen had also placed tin buckets to each side for the mussel shells we would discard after fingering out the delicate mussel meats. A full moon was rising through the pines and there was no breeze to stir the still falling leaves.

The curious partygoers waited with pleasure, sipping glasses of a crisp, white Muscadet. (An oakless Savignon Blanc will also work, Joe explained.) The dark blue shells before us, arranged in a fragile geometry of concentric circles, reminded Joe of the rose window of the tiny church in Saint Sornin where he and Karen had first experienced this dish in 1988. He told the story of their early courtship, and how, on a journey to the Atlantic coast of France, their hosts had prepared local mussels with this technique.

As the darkness began to close in around us, our intrepid hosts for this dinner, John and Julie Woodmansee, came forward. Julie rolled in a wheelbarrow full of very dry pine needles collected from the yard. Joe and Karen spread loose handfuls over the shells, and some observers took another step back, anticipating the flames.           

Like the coniferous forests of western France, North Carolina offers abundant pine, and in this Durham suburb, some of Julie and John’s neighbors had taken advantage of the tall, straight pines in their yards by suspending long, straight strings of Christmas lights from up high and all the way down to the ground. As so often happens in such a community, whoever first came up with this novel holiday decoration had by then been emulated by many others down the block, and now these impossibly tall and straight antennas of colored light rose toward the sky among the trees around us as we waited for the cooking to begin.

Though I discovered some Éclade de Moules recipes that call for the overkill of a blow torch to light the pine fuel, Joe and Karen took turns with a box of matches, and soon the needles sent up a bold plume of white smoke. Bright flames followed and warmed our faces. When the needles were reduced to glowing strands of orange spagehetti, the cooks began blowing on the pile to keep the heat going deep in the nest of needles. Water began steaming and dripping over the edges of the board and struck the patio stones below.  The mussels were opening and releasing the Canadian sea at our feet. A marshy smell soon wafted over us.  

Now Joe produced a piece of cardboard to fan the needles. "In France it would be a very particular kind of postal carton,” he said, grinning. He admitted that getting the mussels sufficiently cooked is an art he has only mastered after many tries, including one early effort in which his mother-in-law became ill from eating an undercooked mussel. Of course you only cook mussels that are unbroken and only eat the ones that open easily.

“They need the intense heat for at least five minutes,” Joe said. Some recipes call for 10 minutes, and in one picture of this process, the mussels were laid out on green fig leaves, which would lend an added touch of sweetness, I suspect. Our mussels were quite done after a good application of eight or ten inches of pine needles kept burning by vigorous fanning. Some in the circle stepped forward to blow with their breath as the flames diminished. Eventually Joe’s cardboard was used to scatter the lingering ashes which, once removed, revealed once more the now black mass of shells beginning to cool to the touch.

Karen sliced up a hearty boule of homemade bread  into small pieces, and set out a softened butter that had been mixed with crystals of French sea salt to be taken with the mussels and wine according to the French tradition. The shells were brittle, charred, and easily fell open. The smoky taste of the meat reflected the resinous pine, or at least I imagined that it did. It was exceptional.

In her 2015 book, Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods, the University of Wisconsin sociologist Jennifer A. Jordan considers the power of food as ritual and memory maker, a practice which begins in childhood across all cultures and carries us through our lives, often filling us with a wistful hope of reproducing some or other family dish we remember from long ago. Joe and Karen were kind enough to share this deeply felt ritual with all of us on the second day of December, and now we, too, have a valuable memory to carry. As we drove home through the Woodmansees’ neighborhood, the vertical cords of ascending colored lights put me in mind of all those strands of blue mussels strung up and still growing, buffeted beneath the chill waters of Prince Edward Island, waiting for more harvest.

See the video of the process: