Clam Sauce with Tomatoes
Let’s see, the last time I’ve cooked with clams is … never. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever eaten clams, other than in a soup, more than a handful of times. Mussels, yes, but clams not very often. Happily, Marcella provides explicit directions on how to prepare the clams for cooking.
This recipe call for littleneck clams. I had to drive into Nepean (about 40 miles from my home) to Lapointe’s Fish Market – http://www.lapointefish.ca/ – phoned ahead to make sure the clams were available at that location. Lapointe’s has a larger presence in downtown Ottawa in the Byward Market area – but that would have added quite a bit of time & some inconvenience to my excursion. Having read Marcella’s directions on the preparation of the clams, I was most impressed by the counter guy at Lapointe’s as he sorted through the selection available to make sure that the ones he sold me were top quality. Highly recommend Lapointe’s – they know what they are doing.
I like most seafood – cuttlefish being the only exception so far – but my wife doesn’t stray far from salmon. In fact, she’s been known to refuse to enter a perfectly good restaurant in Paris because there were too many fish on the menu. My challenge with this recipe was to prepare something that my wife would eat.
This is a pasta dish with a clam-based tomato sauce – ingredients shown below.
Unlike some other recipes prepared so far, everything (except the pasta) is prepared in a sauce pan.
From start to finish, the dish takes about an hour. Is it worth it? Well, my wife, the mollusk-phobe, went back for seconds. Delicious.
Driving 40 miles for clams? You are really taking this commitment to heart, Doug. And you evidently have a mean hand with pasta sauces, converting your spouse first to anchovies, then to clams. I find that very often someone who claims not to like any particular variety of seafood has experienced it in a mediocre execution. Good, fresh seafood prepared in the deft, unlabored Italian manner is generally very easy to take.
I wonder how you have experienced cuttlefish. In Venice, small, fresh cuttlefish from the lagoon is so highly prized that in the market it is priced several times imported Norwegian salmon. Its flesh is tender and sweet-tasting and its ink is the only one that Venetians will use on risotto or pasta, preferring it by far to squid ink. I can’t find such cuttlefish here and both Victor and myself miss it very much.
Good for you to go to such lengths to procure a quality ingredient, very impressive!
I have had many friends and family members say things such as “I don’t like” (insert whatever variety of seafood here). When I ask why, they say “it smelled and tasted fishy” meaning not in a good way. Nothing like high quality, fresh seafood.
Marcella, I ordered cuttlefish at a recommended seaside restaurant – Dona Barca – in Portimao in the Algarve. My first mistake was not inquiring what they were. I was expecting a fish – you know something with gills & fins. Instead I got a plateful of large black bugs which I tried to eat – my second mistake.
I am an apheresis blood donor. I drive into Ottawa every two weeks to make my donation. Normally I plan my special Pomodori e Vino shopping around my visits to the blood clinic. However, the littleneck clams (& swordfish steaks for another recipe) jaunt was a special trip. No problem – if I wasn’t willing to go out of my way a bit, I wouldn’t have agreed to join the group when I was asked.
Another wonderful sounding (and looking) pasta from you Doug. I’m enjoying reading your posts.
I have never eaten cuttlefish. I did however snorkel over one in a little bay in Sydney. It was a magnificent creature. I was also fortunate to see sea horses in the same bay. Eventually I saw stingrays as well, which didn’t work out so well for me as I got barbed by one and spent days in Emergency having my foot operated on. Strangely enough, on my first day out I enjoyed a dish of clams cooked in the Italian fashion, although not with pasta, at a lovely place overlooking Bondi beach.
If you were expecting gills and fins, Doug, cuttlefish in its ink must have been a shock. Our appreciation of food is not pure sensation, it reaches us through various filters, some of them cultural, some of them sentimental, some made up of expectation. If you pick something up from a buffet table that looks like an apricot tart to you, but turns out upon eating it to be a salmon canape, the flavor will be most disagreeable, even if it is the finest wild caught Scottish salmon. I taught classes in Venice for over twenty years and I never let a class leave without having tasted black risotto with cuttlefish. I prepared them for the experience and I can’t remember a single student who failed to enjoy it. I wish it had been you that I took in hand to my favorite restaurant.
I am grateful for the conscientiousness, skill, and literacy that you are contributing to this project.