The beautiful thing about Rowan Spencer and Emma Leigh Macdonald's seafood flatbread is that their favorite part about eating steamed mussels—dipping bread into the salty shellfish broth—happens no matter how you enjoy it. In their inaugural Family Style series, the creative pair known as Mon Petit Canard share an original recipe for the Feast of the Seven Fishes—along with some delectable musical pairings.
The Italian-American tradition of the Feast of the Seven Fishes has been in practice for who-knows-how-long. The Christmas Eve-meal has multiple possible origin points, but is generally thought to have emerged from the Roman Catholic tradition of not eating meat the night before a feast (one night of pescetarianism, but make it a banquet). Following the last season of The Bear, though, we would bet a lot on there being even more interest in the meal come this December 24. Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy’s mother—her nails, her timers—cemented the dinner in popular culture, when last year we found it required a little bit of explanation to most.
We began our own FO7F tradition this time last year. We are not Italian, and that episode hadn’t aired yet, but we are two people who bring tables of friends and strangers together over food and music for a living. We love a conceptual framework to do so, too, and so last December at Rhodora Wine Bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York we hosted our take on the abundant seafood menu.
This year, we’ll be back in the same kitchen with seven new dishes, but before that we’re testing one out with you here. Whether that’s taken as encouragement to come try it made by us on December 19 or 20, or to incorporate it into your own holiday cooking, we are glad to be talking about food from our inboxes to yours. We’ll be sharing recipes and their recommended audio pairings monthly in the new year: testing out how to bring people together from a distance as well as in the spaces we get to take over in our pop-up series Mon Petit Canard. More on that later.
The beautiful thing about this dish is that our favorite part about steamed mussels—dipping bread into the salty shellfish broth—happens no matter how you enjoy this little bundle. That being the case, the only pairing it should need is a great glass of white or orange wine, or some sparkling water with a generous pour of Tart-brand vinegar in the mix.
Flatbread with mussels, parsley oil, chili, and lemon zest
Recipe to make eight flatbreads, each one about the size of your palm. Note, you will have some extra parsley oil with these quantities—you are welcome!
Ingredients:
- About 40 mussels (4 lbs), cleaned
- Two cloves garlic, thinly sliced
- One bunch parsley
- One quart grapeseed oil
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 tablespoon instant yeas
- 360 grams all-purpose flour
- 236 grams warm water
- 4 bunches scallions, chopped
- Fresh chilis, chopped
- Salt
- Olive oil
- Lemon for zesting
Directions:
- Every part of this dish can be made a bit ahead of time, but if you are making everything to eat as soon as possible it’s best to start with the flatbread dough. To do so, whisk together a pinch of salt with the sugar, yeast, and water in a big mixing bowl. Leave it for about 5 minutes until the yeast starts to froth, then add in the flour. Once it has come together into a dough, cover it with saran wrap and leave it somewhere warm for an hour—it should double in size at least.
- While the dough is doing its thing, get the scallions sauteing in a pan on medium-low heat with a little bit of olive oil until they are soft. These are optional! We typically have a version of this flatbread at every pop-up of ours (sometimes topped with trout roe, sometimes with a braised meat like lamb, or sometimes on its own as a side dish), and mixing an allium into the dough adds a little something that we love. We also incorporated ramp leaves into the dough once which we will absolutely do again when the season graces us with those beauties next.
- Now for the mussels: given that these will be doused in several different flavors once the pizzettes/breads are assembled, they can be steamed very simply. Get a drizzle of oil and two cloves of thinly-sliced garlic into a pot, get it hot and add the cleaned mussels in their shells (we’ll use about five per flatbread here). Once the mussels have had a chance to come up to the temperature of the pot, add some water or wine to come about halfway up the mussels and put a lid on. Once they open, remove them from their shells and pull off their little beards, and set them aside until you’re ready to tuck them into their flatbread beds / jacuzzis of sauce.
- To make the parsley oil, add a quart of grapeseed oil and one bunch of parsley—stems and all—into a blender and buzz until the parsley is as small as it’s going to get, using the handheld stick to help it along. Pour the oil into a fine strainer over a bowl and let the pulp strain out (if you have cheesecloth, use it as a double layer on top of the strainer to get an even cleaner result). If you have a squeeze bottle or an old olive oil bottle to decant your herb oil into, that's the best vessel for this, but a bowl and a spoon will also do!
- When the dough has risen, mix in the scallions and divide the dough into eight pieces; roll these out on a floured surface. When you’re ready to cook, push five or so mussels into the top of each piece—they should look like a danish; ready for the dough to puff up around them into charred bubbles when they cook.
- Get some oil hot in a pan on medium, and place the prepared breads in the pan; as many as will fit without crowding. When the surface bubbles after about 3-5 minutes, it’s ready. Be careful not to brown the bottom too much while you wait for the dough to cook through! Take the flatbreads out of the pan with a spatula and finish by giving the center a big squeeze of parsley oil, a sprinkle of chopped chilis, and a generous amount of lemon zest and Maldon salt to finish. As for eating, we are still working out whether this is a knife-and-fork or a hand situation—please let us know which you are gravitating toward at home, and how it’s going.
Often when we are cleaning up at the end of an event, a pop-up, a DJ set, or a dinner at home—especially if it’s Italian-leaning like this one—we take things in a Big Night direction with tracks like the three below (and if you haven’t watched the all-time great movie Big Night, maybe leave the dishes for tomorrow and watch that tonight instead).
"Abbronzatissima” by Edoardo Vianello
"Claudio Villa a mezza voce” by Claudio Villa
"L’appuntamento” by Ornello Vanoni
Mon Petit Canard is a pop-up series with daily changing menu, music, location and design by Rowan Spencer and Emma Leigh Macdonald.