Food - The Ram

The Ram in Firle on a Sunday afternoon. We’ve long ago booked the table overlooking the garden. My girlfriend has collected a strange entourage for her daughter’s fifth birthday, in the Village Hall after lunch. Her mother, sister and sister’s two kids. Her daughter, of course. Her daughter’s father. And, oddly, her Thai ex boyfriend (in the UK for a week) and his wife. Then me.
I decide to play a background role in affairs. I fancy a dish I can really concentrate on, something I can hide behind. Luckily they have mussels on the menu. Mussels fit the bill. They arrive in a huge white bowl, with a matching one laid upside down on the top and a fingerbowl placed on top of that, with hot water and lemon slices. There’s also a bowl of chips, cut thin in the French style. The mussels have been cooked in a creamy sauce with bacon, and, strangely, sprigs of rosemary. There are hundreds of them. Here’s the deal. Pull off the empty half of the shell, toss it into the empty bowl, scoop up some sauce and bacon into the mussel-bearing shell; slurp up the juice whilst simultaneously pulling the mussel from its root with your upper teeth. Swallow liquid, chew mussel and bacon, swallow mussel and bacon. Wash fingers in the finger bowl. Grab a few chips. Start all over again. It’s delicious. It’s perfect. It takes up most of my attention for a good twenty minutes. When I’ve finished, though, I realise I’ve eaten the whole of my meal with my hands. Do mussels and in-laws mix? I guess I’ll find out soon enough. AL