Spaghetti Alle Vongole
- 2 cups small clams, such as Manila or littlenecks
- 5oz spaghetti
- 1 clove garlic
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1/2 teaspoon dried red chilli pepper flakes
- 1/3 cup white wine or vermouth (Noilly Prat for choice)
- 1-2 tablespoons chopped parsley
- Put the clams to soak in a sinkful of cold water, while you heat the water for the pasta.
- When the water comes to the boil, add salt and then the spaghetti.
- Cook the spaghetti until nearly but not quite ready: youre going to give it a fractional amount more cooking with the clams and their winey juices so you need to leave room for absorption.
- Try and time this so that the pastas ready at the time you want to plunge it into the clams.
- Otherwise drain and douse with a few drops of olive oil.
- Mince, grate or finely slice the garlic and, in a pan with a lid into which you can fit the pasta later, fry it gently (it mustnt burn) in the olive oil and then crumble in the red chilli pepper flakes.
- Drain the clams, discarding those that remain open, and add the closed ones to the garlic pan.
- Pour over the wine or vermouth and cover.
- In 2 minutes, the clams should be open.
- Add the pasta, put the lid on again and swirl about.
- In another minute or so everything should have finished cooking and come together: the pasta will have cooked to the requisite tough tenderness and absorbed the salty, garlicky, winey clam juices, and be bound in a wonderful sea-syrup.
- But if the pasta needs more cooking, clamp on the lid and give it more time.
- Chuck out any clams that have failed to open.
- Add half the parsley, shake the pan to distribute evenly, and turn into a plate or bowl and sprinkle over the rest of the parsley.
- Cheese is not grated over any pasta with fish in it in Italy (nor indeed where garlic is the predominant ingredient, either) and the rule holds good.
- You need add nothing.
- Its perfect as it is.
- If perfection can be improved upon, however, the thing that will do it is a glass of icy cold and flinty white wine or an almost-freezing beer to be drunk alongside.
clams, clove garlic, olive oil, red chilli pepper, white wine, parsley
Taken from www.cookstr.com/recipes/spaghetti-alle-vongole (may not work)