Leafing through Luigi Sada’s book of La Cucina Pugliese, I couldn’t find riso, patate e cozze (rice, potatoes and mussels). I was looking for rice dishes in primi piatti, lost in the countless, great-sounding recipes for mussels and other shellfish from the heel of Italy – in short, the wrong chapter. This layered bake of rice, sliced potatoes, tomatoes, cheese and mussels is the first recipe in the chapter titled Les Soupes (oddly, in French). Sada crowns riso, patate e cozze, also known as tiella, “the queen of minestre”, and notes that it is made differently from town to town, and that this “mothership recipe” is tiella barese from Puglia’s capital, Bari. It includes courgettes and uses pecorino. Meanwhile, other recipes from Bari remind us that there is no such thing as a definitive version, each suggesting wildly different proportions and all sorts of rice, or not to include courgettes and to use parmesan instead.
What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that a rest brings out the best in tiella – they all advise waiting before eating – as well as the importance of opening the mussels by hand. Several people reassured me that this is just like opening oysters, which, after being defeated by shell-clenched oysters and shamed by a professional shucker, I didn’t find reassuring at all. However, it turns out that if you insert the point of a knife near the hinge, then run the blade between the two shells, mussels, while a faff, are much easier to lever open than oysters. Yet they’re no less dramatic when you pull apart the shells apart and see the soft, secret flesh inside.
