Taranto Mussels

A Taranto mussel is Mytilus galloprovincialis, farmed in the two basins that wrap around the city: the Mar Piccolo, an inland lagoon of roughly twenty square kilometres split into two lobes, and the Mar Grande, the open roadstead sheltered by the Cheradi islands.

What makes the Mar Piccolo unusual are the citri, submarine freshwater springs that well up from the bottom, fed by the karst aquifer of the Murgia plateau. They lower the salinity and carry nutrients, and in that brackish water mussels grow fast and fill their shells.

You taste it. Taranto mussels are less salty than open-sea mussels, distinctly sweeter, with big soft meat, pale in the females and deep orange in the males. They are the exact opposite of the wild moscioli of the Conero coast, which are small, firm and iodine-heavy. Here the character is plumpness and sweetness.

None of this is new. Classical sources describe shellfish farming in these basins in Roman times, and the city lived on mussels and oysters for centuries. The cozza nera tarantina is listed among Puglia's traditional food products.

Sweet and mild, with far less of the saline slap most people expect from a mussel. The flavour is closer to a scallop than to an oyster: soft, slightly milky, with a gentle marine finish rather than a mineral one.

The texture is what farmed lagoon mussels do best. In season the meat is large, tender and juicy, and it fills the shell rather than rattling around inside it. Overcook it by a minute and it shrinks and toughens like any mussel, but it has more margin than a wild one.

The liquor is the giveaway: sweeter and less salty than the liquid from Atlantic or open-sea mussels, which is why Puglian cooking piles black pepper on it. The classic dish is called impepata for a reason: the pepper is there to give the sweetness something to push against.

Out of season, roughly November to March, they are noticeably leaner and less interesting. This is a summer mussel.

Taranto mussels are big and sweet, so they take heavier treatment than a wild mussel does.

The simplest dish is impepata: mussels in a wide pan with oil, garlic, parsley and a great deal of coarsely ground black pepper, lid on, off the heat the moment they open. Strain the liquor and keep it: it is the sauce.

Arraganate are the baked version: half shells topped with breadcrumbs, garlic, parsley, oil and sometimes a piece of tomato, three minutes under a hot grill. Cozze ripiene alla tarantina are something else entirely: the shells are stuffed with a bread, egg and cheese mixture, tied shut and simmered in tomato sauce, which then dresses the pasta.

Then there is tiella: layers of rice, potato and mussels in a baking dish with onion, tomato, pecorino and parsley, an hour in the oven. Bari and Taranto both claim it and each insists the other ruins it.

Raw with lemon is a genuine Taranto habit, but raw bivalves are the commonest food source of hepatitis A and norovirus, and purification lowers that risk without removing it. Use only labelled, same-day shellfish if you do it, and skip it in pregnancy, in early childhood, and with any immune compromise.

They stay alive until they go into the pan, and everything else follows from that. They sit in the least cold part of the fridge, in an open container, under a damp cloth. Never submerged in fresh water, which kills them within half an hour, and never sealed inside a closed bag. The working window is twenty four hours, forty eight at the outside, and the date on the dispatch centre label is the reference rather than the look of the shells. While they wait they lose the seawater held between the valves and grow noticeably lighter.

Clean them shortly before cooking rather than in advance: pull the byssus towards the pointed end, scrape off the encrustations and rinse under cold running water without leaving them to soak. Cooked, shelled and covered with their own filtered liquor, they hold a day or two in the fridge, and the flesh firms up as it sits. Freeze them only once cooked and shelled, for a couple of months. The filtered cooking liquor freezes in cubes and is the base of any seafood risotto.

The shell is blue-black turning violet, smooth and fairly thin, which is what suspended rope growing produces; a mussel scraped off rock is thicker and more encrusted. The size is generous and even, because they are graded as they come off the ropes. The real signal is yield: opened in season, a Taranto mussel fills its shell right to the edges, and a small piece of meat rattling around inside a large shell means either the wrong season or a different product. Weight should match size, since a very light one is hollow and a very heavy one is carrying sand.

Closed valves, or valves that close when tapped, tell you the animal is alive. Species matters abroad: this is Mytilus galloprovincialis, whereas northern shops mostly sell Mytilus edulis from Ireland, Holland or Canada, rounder and paler shelled, and New Zealand green-lipped mussels are a different genus again. The label from the depuration or dispatch centre carries the harvest area and the date, and it is the document worth asking for.

In Italy, any fishmonger from spring to early autumn: 3 to 6 euros a kilo in Taranto itself, 5 to 9 elsewhere, and 7 to 11 for cleaned vacuum packs. That is roughly 2 to 4 dollars per pound, or 3 to 8 pounds per kilo: mussels are a cheap food everywhere, and the variable is season, not price.

Outside Italy you will not find Taranto mussels as such; live shellfish with a two-day shelf life does not export well. Buy the best local live mussels instead and use the Puglian recipes, which is what the substitutes list is for.

What matters far more than provenance is the label. All live bivalves must carry a health mark from a purification or dispatch centre stating the species, the harvesting area and the packing date. That label is the entire traceability chain, and it is the reason to buy from a shop rather than from an informal stall.

In season, look for shells that are closed or that close when tapped, a heavy feel for the size, and no sand rattling inside. Buy them on the day you cook them.

Taranto's old town sits on an island between the two seas, joined by two bridges, and it is where to eat: small trattorie, mussels in every form, fish landed from the Mar Grande. The national archaeological museum, MArTA, holds the extraordinary gold work of the Greek city of Taras and explains how rich this place once was.

Along the Mar Piccolo, the cozzaruoli still sell directly from stalls on the railing above the channel. It is the most Taranto scene there is, and you should buy from the ones with proper labelling.

In summer, mussel festivals run along the Ionian coast west and east of the city. Further afield, Puglia's other mussel grounds are at Varano and in the Gulf of Manfredonia, and Bari makes its own claim on the rice, potato and mussel bake that Taranto also considers its own.