« Retro-souffle Sweeter than Mother’s Love »

Littleneck Clams Gone to Glory

A more devoted blogger would have taken a picture of a bowl heaped with tonight’s pasta with clams, but I’m annoyingly obsessive about eating pasta while it’s piping hot, so I didn’t even look for the camera until the clams were a delicious memory.

J. is reading Bill Buford’s “Heat” and decided we should make linguine with clams, Babbo-style. In a large sauté pan I cooked onions, garlic, chili flakes and bacon (instead of the suggested pancetta; I’m still in the land of marvelous beaches and mediocre food stores) in olive oil and then added white wine and butter to make what Buford describes as a “messy buttery mush.”
In a large pot of heavily salted boiling water I cooked the linguine for about five minutes and then dumped the clams into the buttery mush pan . When the linguine was a minute or so from the al dente stage, I pulled the linguine from its pot – letting some of the starchy cooking water cling to the strands—heaped it on top of the clams and added a large handful of minced parsley. A couple quick tosses and then I followed Buford’s instructions to “let the whole thing cook for another half minute or so, swirling, swirling until the sauce streaks across the bottom of the pan; splash it with olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner.”
And, I’d add: delicious.

Tags: Babbo, Bill Buford, Mario Batali

Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 2:36 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.