Midia Saganaki

"Saganaki" names the vessel, not the food: the sagani is a small, heavy, two-handled frying pan, and any dish cooked and served in it can be called saganaki — most famously the slab of fried cheese, but also shrimp, mussels, or sausage in tomato sauce. The seafood saganaki dishes are tied to the psarotaverna and the ouzeri, the casual seafood-and-ouzo tavernas of the Aegean and the northern ports, where small hot pans of shellfish in tomato are a defining order. The addition of feta and a splash of ouzo is the standard Greek seafood-saganaki signature; the anise of the ouzo and the salt of the feta are tuned to the brine of the shellfish.

Plump mussels in their shells, glossed in a loose, tangy tomato sauce with a faint liquorice note from the ouzo. Pockets of feta gone soft and creamy, salting the sauce from within. The mussels give up their own briny liquor as they open, so the sauce tastes of the sea as much as the tomato. Eaten by tipping the mussel and sauce straight from the shell, then mopping the pan with torn bread.

Mussels cook in the time it takes their shells to open — a minute or two of steam in the simmering sauce — and overcooking past that point shrinks and toughens them, so they go in last. Any mussel that stays shut after cooking is discarded. The ouzo is added before the tomato and reduced so its alcohol burns off, leaving only the anise aroma, which would otherwise read harsh. The feta is stirred in or scattered off the heat at the very end: feta is a brined cheese that softens and weeps creaminess but does not melt to a smooth pool like a rennet cheese, and holding it back from high heat keeps that crumbled-but-creamy texture rather than a greasy split.