Mejillones a la Marinera

Mejillones a la marinera are Galician coastal cooking, not merely mussels with a splash of wine. What makes them marinera is the sauce: onion and garlic cooked down in olive oil, bay, dry white wine, sweet pimentón and a little flour, all deepened with the mussels' own briny liquor. In Galicia this is the sort of cazuela, the wide serving dish, that asks for bread before it asks for a fork.

The step that decides the dish comes after the shells begin to open. I lift out each mussel as it opens, strain its liquor to remove the grit, and reduce that liquor without the shellfish in the pan. The sauce gains depth while the mussels stay tender. Leave them boiling through the reduction and you'll have a fine sauce full of little rubber erasers, which is poor payment for good shellfish.

Galicia's raft-grown mussels are large, full and gently sweet. If you're far from Spain, fresh cultivated blue mussels are the proper substitute; their meat is usually smaller and their liquor may be sharper and saltier, so taste before seasoning and reduce with care. Any dry, unoaked white wine can stand in for a Galician wine, though it won't bring quite the same fresh Atlantic edge. The line in my Margin is short: take them out, strain the liquor, put them back. Siempre sale, si lo sigues, it turns out if you follow it.