Food You Can Eat: Moules Dijonnaise (Mussels in a Mustard Sauce)

Best served if you can have a guest who will sing a few rounds of "La Vie en Rose."

10/12/24 MatthewCrawley 8
Yes, waiter, I will have all of these...

I have no idea when this will be posted but I trust it will be cold enough that this will seem appealing to make, and I make and eat mussels year-round. I have comments before we begin. If one or more of your mussels won’t open during the steaming process, throw it out. It’s inedible. Also, this seems like a small amount of Dijon but it’s good though. You don’t want to overwhelm the mussels. This recipe is kind of fussy but you can ignore parts of it. God knows I do.

INGREDIENTS

  • 2 -3 tablespoons  butter
  • 1⁄4cup finely chopped onion
  • 2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
  • 1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic
  • 3 lbs  mussels, beards removed, cleaned and scrubbed 
  • sea salt
  • fresh ground pepper
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 sprigs  fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1⁄4cup  dry white wine
  • 1⁄2cup  heavy cream
  • 2 tablespoons  Dijon mustard
  • 2 tablespoons finely chopped flat leaf parsley

DIRECTIONS

  • Heat the butter in a large saucepan until melted.
  • Add the onions, shallots and garlic and cook briefly, until wilted.
  • Do not brown.
  • Add the mussels, salt, pepper, bay leaf, thyme, white wine and cream.
  • Cover closely and bring to a boil. lower heat to medium.
  • Cook for about 5 minutes, shaking to redistribute the mussels.
  • Cook until all the mussels are opened.
  • Using a slotted spoon, transfer the mussels to a serving bowl.
  • Keep warm.
  • Continue cooking the sauce for a minute, remove bay leaf and the thyme.
  • Stir in the mustard with a wire whisk while heating.
  • Do not boil.
  • Spoon equal portions of the sauce over the mussels and sprinkle with parsley.
  • Serve immediately with crusty bread.
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About MatthewCrawley 402 Articles
I died in an automobile accident just over a century ago, right after my wife/cousin gave birth to my son.

8 Comments

    • The thing about mussels, I find, is that it is a lot of effort to eat them for the reward you get. But when the mustard and garlic and butter and everything else hits you forget all of this and fully believe you could live your entire life on the Cousin Mattie All-Mussels Diet™.

      My poor cardiologist…

    • Finding this recipe all those years ago was a revelation. I have mentioned before that there is, kind of startlingly, an excellent seafood market really close to us. I get the mussels there. (Have you ever seen someone hacking into the corpse of a shark on a bed of ice? You really get up close and personal with your dinner ingredients at that place. And the octopus/calamari…)

  3. i love mussels….but cant cook them myself and then eat them….

    tho maybe…not using a glass lid would help

    turns out i see them opening and closing and anthropomorph that shit to the point we are conversing in my head

    and then by the time its ready to eat….im all like…yeah…but i cant eat joe….he was funny

    • You are living among the greatest mussels empires the world has ever known, Belgium and northern France. One time when I was in northern France, near Dieppe, not on a D-Day-related excursion, we were on our way from Germany to Britain (pre-Chunnel, mind you) and we stopped for lunch and I ordered the mussels. So delicious. The lunch went on for hours. Wine was involved. We ended up taking a room at a small hotel and didn’t get to London until late the following day.

      That’s the great thing about Better Half. He wasn’t there, it was before we met, but he would have (mostly) gone with the flow. I should write a post about the most outlandish adventures we’ve been on.

      I had a short-lived series called “Going Places” but I could do a brief round-up of quick and quirky detours, like the time that I spotted a sign for a dinosaur “museum.” Turns out, the “museum” was the backyard of a Levittown house where there were a couple of large paw prints, presumably left by dinosaurs. I gave the very “Deliverance” couple a fiver and we fled. God knows what was buried in that backyard next to the paw prints but luckily it wasn’t us.

      • belgium and france?

        greatest mussle empires on earth??

        whaaaat?

        i mean for one…the belgians cant be great at anything

        but for two its practically our national dish

        only beaten by raw herring (and honestly i think thats just coz we get a kick out of watching tourists trying to eat them)

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