So in the spirit of nostalgia triggered by the roadtrip post, one of the most evocative tastes for me is seafood pasta, usually linguine with clams (I will do a specific post on this later) but also any long pasta with seafood. This inimitable aroma is so wonderful that this would be, if pressed, my Last Supper.
It’s the Trinity of flavours I am fixated with, which for me represent quite utterly, Summer at the Italian seaside and ergo, childhood.
The trio of flavours are: garlic, olive oil…..
The basis for most beginnings in our “cucina”: garlic and extra virgin olive oil… all “soffritto” starts in this way…
…and fresh parsley… And if you are from the Abruzzo, or simply you put some store by a teensy taste-bud-induced adrenaline hit, then ramp this up an all-important notch with CHILLIES! (in case you were going to protest, read this: they’re good for you)
This is the Abruzzo chilli, growing on the plant. It barely looks real, but this one I snapped on a plant at La Bilancia restaurant, Loreto Aprutino.
When a few years ago my husband suggested we go with our baby daughter to New England in August, I was super-excited to try a different sort of Summer but it transpired that it just didn’t scratch that all-important itch. The heat was not dry enough, the sounds not as evocative, the smells not so alluring. Now I know this has to do with my own conditioning – I have friends who feel Summer isn’t Summer without New England, as it is in part what you are used to. To me for example, New England beats almost very other place in the world when it comes to Autumn. For that I take my hat off. (But more on that another time.)
Anyway all this to say that we visited Nantucket and the Vineyard and both places have their own beauty but I found them just too one-dimensional, particularly in terms of taste and culinary offerings: Lobster with butter (what about the garlic?). Fried clam strips (lemon?). Clam chowder, creamy and rich. All tasty enough but nothing to blow your mind, and after a few meals of this ilk not only did I feel like I was developing gout (and this just didn’t marry well with the season and the need to sport a bikini) but it also didn’t provide enough excitement for my palate and my day was too bland. There was no ritual, no formal punctuation of the circadian rhythms. There was so much propensity to snack and imbibe, with little of quality and clarity of flavour. Then it made me sad that everything was so unceremonious: take-away coffees from sandwich bars and perching at booths serving seafood in paper flutes (with minimal seasoning!). Apart from the top end restaurants which were inevitably quite formal, I felt like I was eating in a deluxe TGI Friday or at a festival. By day 3 I had started cooking every single meal in an attempt to recreate the Summer sizzle and reclaim my health and sanity. There is not a time we go to the States that we don’t come back feeling sluggish, chubbier, despite all the healthy options apparently available. Why is that? We just watched Fed Up and it scared us. It made me very wary of eating anything other than home-made meals. Was I imagining it or were even the ingredients in the markets tasting less real, less vital, less intense? I was getting paranoid. Enough of the heavy food issues. In all honesty it was more than the food itself we were missing. It was the feeling, the sensory triggers: the comforting scrape of clogs and flip flops deserting the beach at midday, the clink of cutlery and crockery meeting emanating from nearby balconies as they set their tables for al fresco lunches, the sudden hush that descends at 2:30pm as siestas kick off for some respite from the Mediterranean sun, the sole backing track the stop-starting sawing sound of the cicadas and the intermittent sput-sputtering of an ancient two-stroke vespa breaking the self-imposed 40 degree curfew.
Since, when we are in the Abruzzo, we live up in the cool of the hills, we have to drive 40 minutes to the beach and back every day so the lunch time siesta at home is not an option. We stay at our beach club and have lunch there, under the pineta (the strip of pine forest between the beach and the interior), and typically we consume a lunch of anitpasti of Cozze (mussels) and Zuppa di Pesce / Brodetto (fish soup) (individual posts on these later) – and then a primo of Spaghetti allo Scoglio (spaghetti with seafood – “scoglio” is a rock or outcrop where seafood might cling) or Linguine alle Vongole. 
Depending on the antipasti, we might then have a fritto misto (fried squid, fish and other crustaceans)
and then finish off with some tomatoes (de rigueur) and watermelon. On a side note: Watermelon is a big tradition across the Southern Med so I found it baffling that it apparently has all these racial connotations in the USA – not unlike Chicken Soup /Broth being attributed solely to Jewish cuisine when in actual fact it is a soul food doled out in Italy, Poland and all across Europe, China and beyond.
So this recipe can be tweaked with any seafood you can find (clams, mussels, shrimp, langoustines etc.). I take a slightly unorthodox approach and boost the juicy base with my own fish stock which I make sporadically and freeze in those little baby-food puree cubes and then once frozen I decant them loose to a ziplock and throw in a few mid-recipe. I will provide a recipe for this stock in the Recipe Vault shortly. As for cleaning the mussels and clams, please read here.
Lastly, this recipe can be made in the in rosso (with tomato/ “red”) version too – I personally prefer the in bianco (as it allows the seafood to really sing, unobscured and unadorned).
Spaghetti allo Scoglio in bianco (Seafood Spaghetti – no tomato)
To make sure I don't overcook the seafood I use the pasta times as my yard-stick: I start boiling the water for the pasta and that is plenty of time for me to chop and prep the few ingredients required. When throw in the pasta I then turn to the fish and start cooking seafood element of the dish too. It should take only the 7 minutes or so it takes the pasta to cook al dente. At the end I just throw them together. I let the pasta absorb the juices and come to. In this way the whole thing should take about 10 mins total from turning on the heat to actually sitting down to eat it.
Ingredients
- 500g Spaghetti
- 1kg mussels (cleaned)
- 1kg clams (cleans) and/or langoustines / shrimp
- bunch fresh flat leaf parsley
- 5-second glug of extra virgin olive oil (enough to cover the bottom of a heavy saucepan measuring approx 30cm across)
- a good pinch or two of salt
- 120ml dry white wine
- 3 garlic cloves finely chopped
- 1 small chilli (optional)
- half a sweet pepper (optional)
- freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- Choose a nice deep pan and fill it to 3/4 full with water and a couple of tablespoons of salt and put on to heat for the pasta.
- In the meantime chop your garlic, parsley and pepper and chilli, keeping them in separate mounds so they can be added separately.
- Cover the bottom of a saute pan with the oil, heat gently and add first the finely chopped sweet pepper, then after a minute the chilli and after another minute the garlic (inversely to the speed in which they burn so that there is no bitterness).
- As soon as the garlic starts to turn golden throw in the seafood, slam on the lid and turn up the heat to max.
- The water for the pasta should be boiling by now, so throw the pasta in to the water and stir after a minute or so to avoid sticking and every now and then throughout.
- As soon as the seafood is beginning to bubble and the shells are beginning to pop open, immediately pour over the white wine and keep the lid off, letting the alcohol evaporate off.
- As soon as the steam from the seafood seems to lessen, throw in a cube or two of fish stock (optional - I like my pasta juicy).
- Throw in a handful of finely chopped parsley and perhaps a smidgen more of the fresh chilli.
- Taste the pasta for doneness (approx 7 minutes) and drain, but NOT OVERLY! (this is a mistake made by most novice cooks and is particularly hard to remedy if you have no extra fish stock to loosen your pasta should it be too dry: Pasta keeps sucking up moisture so you need to over compensate knowing that in the 2-3 minutes it takes to get it to the table it will have absorbed a lot of the moisture).
- Throw the lightly drained past straight in to the seafood saute pan and let it all mingle and mix.
- Taste for seasoning and then distribute between 4 bowls putting a bit in each in turn. This is necessary as the first served otherwise gets very little juice and seafood which tends to fall to the bottom.
- Artfully place a few of the choicest seafood offerings on the top of each, a scattering of parsley, fresh olive oil and serve.
- * * *
- Make it clear to your guests that any UNOPENED shells should be discarded and not tampered with as they could be unleash some serious gastro-monsters.
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