❖ MUSSELS ❖

Pen Cove Mussels, from Whidbey Island, WA.
 For sale live at the popular
Seattle Fish Co, 
fish shop and grill, West Seattle, WA.
Saltwater People photo after a delicious lunch.

Living on an island, we eat a fair bit of seafood. We’re surrounded by the Salish Sea—a Pacific coastal waterway between the US and Canada. Most people on the island, if they have a boat, have a crab license. If they don’t have a boat, they can dig along the shore for clams or pry some oysters off the rocks. The ambitious put out strings or bags of seed oysters and grow their own. A few people with large boats have special deep-water winches, lines, and pots to fish for spot prawns in the waters just off shore; others are primarily after salmon or halibut. A visiting marine biologist came to the island’s school a few years ago and taught the children about all the surprising edible foods they could find at the beach. They culminated their study with a feast of barnacles, snails, chitons, bladderwrack, sea lettuce, hijiki, wakame, and bullwhip kelp, prepared by the children and eaten on the sand.

      Intertidal gastropods and seaweed are perfect for children, since they’re both exotic and fairly easy picking, but my favorite seafood is a mollusk: the mussel. Until I was almost 17, however, I didn’t even realize they were edible. They grew throughout the rocky tide pools in Oregon and clung to the pilings along the wharves, their long hairy beards sinuously waving in the currents. My people didn’t eat mussels, though; no Oregonians did, as far as I knew, although the more worldly or well traveled might have. They hadn’t shown up yet in our grocery stores or on our restaurant menus in the 1980s. It took an exchange student from Belgium who went walking with me on the beach one day to point out the delicacies unloved and unsought along the shore. In Belgium, of course, mussels are the key component of moules frites, and, alongside a cellar-temperature beer, practically the country’s national meal.

      But a creosote-covered piling or the pressure-treated wood of a dock is no place to harvest mussels. If you’re foraging, you want to find them on rocks or in tide pools, someplace that’s relatively clean and not impregnated with chemicals. You also want to avoid collecting them during a so-called red tide, the common name for a harmful algal bloom that can make the water turn red, depleting the oxygen in the water and causing the buildup of neurotoxins in filter feeders like mussels. However, the water in a red tide isn’t always red, and using the old mnemonic of avoiding collection during months without the letter “R” isn’t reliable, either. The state maintains a website with current red tide warnings and closures, so you can be fairly sure that the mussels you’re collecting won’t lead to neurotoxic, amnesiac, diarrheal, or paralytic shellfish poisoning—just to cover the main ways that mussels can make you sick or kill you.

      Another precaution is to cook only mussels that are alive. Live mussels will be tightly closed. If they’re just slightly open, you can tap on their shells with a spoon and if they respond by immediately closing, they’re alive. If they don’t respond, they’re dead and you should discard them. Once you’re sure they’re alive, you should soak them in a bowl of cool, fresh water for 20 to 30 minutes to allow them to purge themselves of grit. Then you scrub their shells and debeard them. Debearding is easy; you hold the shell in one hand and tug the beard to the side with the other hand, perhaps wrapping your fingers in a towel for traction, to remove the thin, sticky threads the mussels use to attach themselves to rocks. And then they’re ready to cook. But first you have to find them, which frequently means buying them at the grocery store if there’s no safe, legal place to find them wild.

       Our waterfront property includes just a tiny portion of beach, about thirty feet wide, with no tide pools or big rocks. Most of the beach above the mean low tide mark in Washington State is privately owned, which means that you can’t just wander over to your neighbor’s property and boost their mussels. Most of the tide pools on the island are actually on the tidelands of an 866-acre biological preserve, which makes everything there (including shellfish, also driftwood, agates, and wildflowers) off limits for collection.

      I spend a lot of time in the summer drifting about the bay in a kayak that washed up on