What I didn’t know is that debearding is harder than it sounds, and that the grit on the shells takes so many rinses to wash away. I didn’t know that the smell would be somewhere between heaven and the ocean itself —all those shallots, all that wine. I didn’t know that they’d steam so fast and that before I knew it, I’d be serving this great steaming pot of amazing smells, and I couldn’t have predicted that I’d feel so impossibly proud, standing before this pot.
