Erica De Mane

Spaghetti with cockles, tomatoes, fresh chilies, and sherry.

Recipe:

Spaghetti with Cockles, Tomatoes, Fresh Chilies, and Sherry.

Linguine with clam sauce is a classic Southern Italian pasta that evokes two contrasting basic memories for me. Primarily it was a Christmas Eve dish my mother often made as part of our traditional, if pared down, fish dinner. But it was also a summer pasta, something we’d cook up when my father went clamming on the LILCO-polluted beaches of Long Island, where we lived. The power company used to spill huge amounts of a purple fluorescent oil into the water on a regular basis, and where it went in was, according to my father and his buddies, the best spot for clams. Mostly we ate them raw. I never got sick once, but who knows what the future has in store for me. On a lighter note, when my mother made linguine with clams from those LILCO clams on those warm summer nights, it was to me one of the most beautiful dishes I ever ate, glistening with oil olive and smelling of wine and sea.

We always called the dish linguine with clam sauce, whether made with spaghetti, bucatini, penne, or with actual linguine, as was occasionally the case. There are of course two standard ways to construct this genius dish: red, with tomatoes, or white, with garlic, oil, white wine, and parsley. But there also existed in my family an in-between version made with cherry tomatoes, not a full-on tomato sauce but just dots of tomato punctuating the classic white sauce. This was my favorite way, and it was often our family’s summer way, since we always had cherry tomatoes growing in my father’s little garden.

When I first moved out of the family home, my attempts at linguine with clams were not very appealing, mainly because the results were greasy and garlicky. I wasn’t grasping the finesse. I finally learned to add more clams to produce more clam broth and to add lots of lemon juice and white wine and boil everything down with olive oil until I had a briny, lemony emulsion; this was the base for my white sauce, and with the sprinkling of red pepper flakes we always added, my sauce finally tasted just like my mother’s. It took me longer to get the feel of the cherry-tomato version, since it seemed more elusive in construction, but once I figured it out, all it really involved was adding a few halved cherry tomatoes to my white sauce and there it miraculously was. (My brain can sometimes play tricks on me in the kitchen, making a simple concept seem very difficult. Even after decades of cooking, this still happens on occasion. I wonder if it isn’t all those LILCO clams catching up with me.)

My years of eating this pasta in various restaurants and homes here and in Italy have been, for the most part, disappointing. Most cooks don’t get it right. Too greasy, too garlicky, too dry, overcooked clams, bad clams, overcooked pasta. This dish should have a lightness about it that I almost never seem to encounter in other people’s hands. Southern Italy has made me happy with it on several occasions; once in Ischia, and once in Ceglie Messapica, a little town in the Trulli district of Puglia. But it’s so true that emotion and circumstances can have a profound effect on one’s enjoyment and memory of food, and this was the case when the perfectly cooked spaghetti with clams I ordered in Puglia turned into a turn-off. My husband was suffering from a flare-up of a serious intestinal disease, and he barely had an appetite. He’d order something plain and hardly touch it. I’d try to order things that seemed safe and normal (no raw sea urchin), hoping these dishes would entice him. But I was in Puglia, and I needed to taste this food. One night I settled on spaghetti with clams, very standard, very familiar and unthreatening, I figured. What I ordered turned out to be a textbook version of spaghetti with white clam sauce, so beautiful, with shiny blue-tinged shells, lightly soupy and acidic from white wine, but it wasn’t the thing for Fred, to say the least. His penne with tomatoes sat untouched, and so, for the most part, did my gorgeous clams. It was a sad night. How could he be in this wonderful place and unable to enjoy the food? It seemed so unfair. I felt sorry for both of us. Even now, four years later, I’ve pretty much stayed away from this white version, since it just reminds me of illness, even though Fred is fine now. It’s interesting that many Italians, including my grandmother, always spoke of white food (that is, food without tomatoes) as fare for sick people, but since I’m not a person to give up on a great thing just because of a bad memory, I’ve learned to alter this great dish, concentrating instead on the red and semi-red versions, which don’t remind me of sick times at all. And luckily my husband is now doing so well he eats anything put in front of him.

I’ve been tinkering with the semi-red type of linguine with clam sauce this summer, coming up with a version that is ever so slightly un-Italian, since it includes fresh chilies (not dried flakes), a good shot of fino sherry instead of the dry white wine that was customary in our house, and marjoram (which I love with shellfish), in addition to the abundant parsley my mother always added and the tiniest pinch of pimenton, the Spanish smoked paprika, which along with lemon zest gives it a appealing paella-like quality, making my familiar childhood linguine with clams unfamiliar in a very good way. A fresh start.

Spaghetti with Cockles, Tomatoes, Fresh Chilies, and Sherry

I usually prefer Littlenecks or Manilas for this, since they’re what my family used, but New Zealand cockles remind me of the little clams I ate in Ischia, and they also have the advantage of opening up quickly and all at the same time, and they’re almost sand-free.

(Serves 5 as a first course)

Salt
1 pound spaghetti
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus an extra drizzle
1 small, fresh red peperoncino, seeded and minced
3 summer garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 pint grape tomatoes, cut in half lengthwise
2 pounds cockles, well rinsed
The juice and zest from 1 large lemon
1/8 teaspoon Pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika)
1/2 cup fino sherry
5 sprigs marjoram, the leaves chopped
A handful of Italian parsley, the leaves lightly chopped

Have all your ingredients prepped and ready by the stove.

Bring a large pot of pasta cooking water to a boil. Add a generous amount of salt. Drop in the spaghetti.

In a very large skillet, heat 1/4 cup olive oil over medium high heat. Add the peperoncino and garlic, and sauté a minute, just to open up the flavors. Add the cockles, tomatoes, lemon zest, pimenton, and a pinch of salt, and sauté a minute. Add the sherry and lemon juice and cook, uncovered, until all the cockles open, about 4 minutes. Turn off the heat. You should have about 1/2 inch of fragrant briny boozy broth in the skillet.

When al dente, drain the spaghetti, saving about 1/2 cup of the cooking water, and place it in a large, warmed bowl. Drizzle with a little fresh olive oil and add the marjoram and parsley, giving it a quick toss. Add the cockles with all the skillet liquid, and toss again gently. Add a splash of cooking water, if needed for moisture (there should be about 1/2 inch of liquid in the bottom of the bowl). Add a little salt, if needed. Serve right away.