My husband looked at me with an incredulous expression, “What do you mean recipe? You get some clams and cook them. Then you cook some spaghetti and finish them in a pan with the clams and their juice. That’s it. There is no recipe.” He expounded further saying that it was just a preparazione and not a ricetta, meaning that the dish required nothing more than a procedure of cooking ingredients together with no specific measurements involved or complicated techniques. My recipe-coddling self begged to differ, so I looked it up online. Ha! 800,000 results. How could I go wrong with “Our Step by Step Recipe for Spaghetti alle Vongole”?
I read through a couple and got the gist of the preparazione. I had to admit that at times the need for a recipe is to fill in for experience you haven’t had. Growing up near the Mediterranean and hanging out in kitchens while friends prepared ragù or other Italian specialties just wasn’t my background. Having that piece of paper or webpage with clear instructions fills in for the lack of knowledge and confidence when exploring unknown culinary terrain. We all want what we serve our families, our friends and ourselves to be delicious, and to be guiltless if it isn’t. So, if following the recipe for the carbonara doesn’t work out, you’ve got something you can blame.
So, springing from the confidence of more experience, here it is, spaghetti
Put the clams in a colander and set it in a bowl with cold water for a couple of hours. Change the water a few times. The idea is to clean the sand off of them. Remove any clams with broken shells. Once you’re ready to cook, put a generous amount of olive oil in a pan and a clove or two of garlic. Once the garlic starts sizzling, add the drained claims and cover with a lid. Shake the pan as they cook so they all open. Turn off the heat once the clams have opened. You should have a nice sughetto at the bottom of the pan. Remove the clams from the pan, and start cooking about 1/2 to 1 lb. of spaghetti in boiling water. When the pasta is still very al dente, fire up the clams’ cooking liquid, remove the pasta
Here’s the scoop on what you might be eating when you order a spaghetti alle vongole during your next Italian vacay. Once upon a time, there was a little clam called Venerupis decussata, known commonly in Italy as vongola verace (translates literally to “genuine clam”) and apparently the one for this dish. For commercial reasons,
Juggling nuance between Italian and English, Tatiana lights up her five-burner kitchen top with nostalgia for American food, Bologna-inspired fare and cross-cultural inventions. She and her husband endlessly debate on cooking with or without a recipe. Their son just hopes that dinner will either be plain or have chocolate in it.
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so how can youtell the difference between the 2 clams? I have been scouring the internet to no avail.
In the US, the best substitute are Manila clams - which probably are related to the ones that were seeded in Mediterranean waters - perhaps originally from cargo ships coming from the Pacific Ocean. I have made this dish with local small bay clams, and I prefer the Manila ones.
Nancy