Felicity Cloake’s perfect zuppa di cozze . Photograph: Dan Jones/The Guardian. Food styling: Stevie Taylor. View image in fullscreen Felicity Cloake’s perfect zuppa di cozze . Photograph: Dan Jones/The Guardian. Food styling: Stevie Taylor. How to cook the perfect ... Shellfish How to make the perfect zuppa di cozze – recipe A tomatoey, southern Italian alternative to moules marinière – but who makes the definitive version?
Felicity Cloake Sun 4 Oct 2026 14.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 4 Oct 2026 14.02 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google A bundant, good value and ready in minutes, mussels are one of my favourite seafoods, but when it comes to preparing them, I rarely look farther than northern France. Italians, of course, also eat mussels, and this tomato-rich recipe is a particular favourite in the south – Neapolitans traditionally tuck into zuppa di cozze on Maundy Thursday but it’s found on menus all year round. With its bold flavours and oily, garlicky sauce, it’s a great alternative to creamy moules marinières , and similarly needs no accompaniment but a hunk of bread to make a meal, though chips, of course, are rarely unwelcome.
View image in fullscreen ‘Specifically Neapolitan’: Giallo Zafferano’s zuppa di cozze. All thumbnail photographs byFelicity Cloake. There’s not much to say about the main ingredient, except to bemoan the increasing difficulty in getting hold of live mussels due to the disappearance of so many fresh fish vendors, and the subsequent closure of supermarket fish counters (another rant for another day). Any remaining fishmongers should have British mussels, or they can easily be bought online . Don’t wash them until you’re ready to cook, when you should dump them in the sink and sort through them, discarding any with broken shells or that don’t close when you give them a sharp tap. Rinse with cold water; most mussels on the market are farmed, and rope-grown, so should be pretty clean, and I’ve never seen the point of scrubbing away at barnacles for hours when you’re not going to be eating the shells anyway (though please do enlighten me as to why I should bother). Remove any remaining trailing beards, though – I do have some standards!
The Silver Spoon dry-fries the mussels , then shells them to add to the soup later, while the Giallo Zafferano website steams them in garlicky oil and a little white wine, then removes them from the pot to be returned to the finished soup. It makes more sense to me to eat them as freshly cooked as possible – as Elizabeth David cautions in Italian Food, these “final operations must be carried out only immediately before serving”. Not only does this leave less chance of the shellfish overcooking, but necessarily ensures that every last drop of that delicious mussel liquor makes it into the sauce; tipping it back and forth, as in the Zafferano recipe, risks sacrificing a little, and when there’s not a lot to start with, that’s a gamble I’m not prepared to take.
View image in fullscreen For her zuppa di cozze, Elizabeth David insists that the steaming of the mussels ‘must be carried out only immediately before serving’. Zafferano, whose recipe is specifically Neapolitan, includes octopus, squid and prawns alongside the mussels. Delicious as all those things are, we find the squid and prawns are overcooked and rubbery once they’ve been fried and then simmered in tomato sauce for 15 minutes. If you’d like to include them, I’d fry them briefly first, then return them to the pan…