Sauce #107 | Beached

Linguine alle vongole, no twists

We went to Aldeburgh last weekend. It used to be our go-to escape hatch to the sea back when we lived in East London. Having grown up on the Isle of Wight, Rosie needs her relatively regular seaside fix. Having been sent to boarding school in Scarborough at the age of eight, I can take it or leave it.

Nevertheless, I am nothing if not accommodating of my wife’s whims, so off to Suffolk we went. It’s quite a lot further from Yorkshire than it is from Homerton. I’d been working in London that week so took a leisurely train east on Friday morning, enjoyed a good lunch at the excellent Suffolk, had a snooze, played a little golf, jumped in the sea, and stood in a queue for the fish and chip shop for an hour.

Rosie meanwhile battled the A1, A14, A12, dishing out sick bags to carsick kids, putting down quite a lot of Percy Pigs, and generally just trying not to die of heat. I greeted a consequently quite exhausted and fraught family later that evening with two bags of chips and a smorgasbord of other delights to eat on the beach.

We spent Saturday back on the beach. Not my favourite activity, if I’m honest, but I stuck with it. We had another picnic (another of my less preferred activities but, as I say - trooper) at lunchtime. A wander down the high street for ice creams. Back to the beach. Some paddle boarding, which I conducted with excessive caution after very nearly coming a cropper last summer on the Isle of Wight (another story for another day).

Eating on the beach seemed to be the order of the weekend so in the evening I picked up some sausages for the kids and some clams for me and Rosie and set about making hotdogs and linguine alle vongole.

As I did so I found myself thinking about the instinct to muck about with classic recipes, and how it is so often interpreted as a monstrously arrogant act of disrespect. There’s no doubt I have crossed this line many times (though the udon vongole we served at Pidgin was excellent and entirely on brand) but as I cooked a very much no-bells-or-whistles vongole I thought about this impulse and its origins.

I came to the conclusion that, in many cases, the urge to fiddle with dishes that a non-native has no business fiddling with is born not of disrespect, but dare I say of too much respect. The cook realises that the dish has already been made countless times by people far more qualified than they are. Which is true. And then they—we, I—make the mistake of concluding that the only worthwhile contribution is to leave our own fingerprints on it. It doesn't help that the food world places such an excessive premium on novelty.

These are the sorts of gripping thoughts I have after a day in the beating sun as I cook dinner, as I wash the clams lovingly, as I hack at a red chilli with a blunt knife, as I chop the garlic and reflect on the fact that I very, very seldom chop garlic (always slice, darling, much milder), as I make perhaps the most classically minded vongole you could think of. There is some satisfaction to quieting one’s urge to be creative, and simply to lean into doing something traditional as well as you can.

And vongole is one of the greats for a reason. Occasionally you hear Jamie Oliver and co. spout something about a pasta sauce necessarily taking no longer to make than it takes the pasta to cook, which is self-evidently bollocks when you consider how long a ragù takes to cook, or indeed how quickly fresh pasta is done.

But this actually is one of those dishes. The key is in the juices that leach from the clams, quietly emulsifying with the wine and, if you dare, the perhaps inauthentically added knob of butter. You must hang onto the pasta water to help this along. The fully and fairly disgraced chef Mario Batali observes in the excellent Heat by Bill Buford that the snotty little clam is secondary to its juices but I enjoy the clatter of fork on clamshell, and the process of extracting these sweet, salty jewels.

Feel more than free to add twists at will - no one should object to a smudge of ‘nduja in the place of fresh chilli, for example - but fundamentally this is one of those dishes that works entirely because of its simplicity. Bonus points for eating it on the beach and not complaining.