Almost Italian

End-of-summer signs abound in September; even before Labor Day, Halloween candy appears in stores… Meanwhile, sand is shaken from doormats as families leave the beach to return to school-day routines. For anyone lucky enough to have spent a summer, a week—or even a day—based in an old cottage along the North American Atlantic shore, certain memories are as indelible as tattoos.

Among our own recollections of summers at our grandparents’ cottages on the Connecticut and Rhode Island shorelines, kitchen nostalgia is especially powerful.

Most of the cottages, with their dark, bead-boarded walls, were uninsulated, and the two-by-four spacers between the studs made handy kitchen “shelves” for the staples of an uncomplicated, mid-20th century summer pantry.

With great fondness, we recall the contents of kitchens we knew:

• The glass salt-shakers with rice grains (supposed to absorb moisture and keep the salt from caking).

• Small, dusty tins of dried herbs and spices.

• A somewhat soggy red, yellow, blue, & green cardboard box of Bell’s Poultry Seasoning– an all-purpose dry mix, heavy on sage, that less demanding cooks might have added to meatloaf, burgers, egg salad, and sundry casseroles.

• A jar of garlic salt (or, a head of garlic, if you were Italian).
• A metal-topped shaker of peperoncini, possibly “borrowed” from the nearest pizzeria.
• A cheater’s canister of commercial grated cheese.
• A large canister of Progresso breadcrumbs.
• A bottle of red wine vinegar– to sprinkle on salads or fried fish.
• A tin of olive oil with a galvanized nail closing the hole from which one would pour the oil.
• A box of less-than-crisp saltines or Ritz Crackers…

…all these would fit on the narrow spacers…

Other kitchen fixtures: A hospital-green bread-box that had lost its enamel gleam held doughnuts and bread that would never stay fresh in the damp salt air. In a an old fridge with the curves and chrome of a Chevy Bel-Aire, you’d see the requisite milk, butter, and eggs of breakfast, the same ingredients that also helped turn stale bread into Sunday French toast or other treats.

The refrigerator might also chill a head of iceberg lettuce, jars of relish and pickles, Italian cold cuts, Portuguese sausage, or rashers of bacon (depending on the family and surrounding neighborhood). It was all the stuff of leisure time and simplified meals, especially if the house were a rental without a full family larder.

Our parents, who grew up during the Depression of the 1930′s, taught us to go clamming and told us how their parents had turned the free mollusks into chowders and pasta sauces… They taught us to make them, too.

There were also siren snacks our families never made or served, novelties we’d heard about and craved because–even if they weren’t forbidden- they were like Hostess Twinkies– foreign to our homes and, thus, exotic.

And in this realm of seductive summer foods just-out-of-reach were stuffies, or baked, stuffed quahog clams.

Contrary to some histories, quahogs, Mercenaria mercenaria, did not earn their Latin moniker because some restaurateurs charge too much for what affable Rhode Islanders charitably describe as “clam meatloaf in an ashtray.” In fact, the nomenclatorial master Linnaeus was aware that native Americans had shaped and drilled the violet-lipped shells of this bivalve to fashion beads, the 17th-century currency known as wampum. So whether the chewy meat of a hard-shelled quahog clam yields the “fried clam strips” of your shore dinner, the chopped clams on your white pizza in New Haven, the creamy and clear chowders of the Eastern Seaboard, or the infamous Rhode Island stuffie—all are from the same beast (which in its youth, is the more respectfully treated cherrystone, or little-neck clam).

The ethnic origins of a recipe are often obscure, and in the melting pot of coastal New England, stuffies are served in many shore restaurants and clam shacks with no Italian identification. But because you’ll see stuffies on printed menus and take-out signs for so many Almost Italian ^® eateries from Rhode Island to New Jersey, we feel compelled to discuss this iconic summer item, usually presented as an appetizer.

We’ve read scores of stuffie recipes and have made them ourselves, in the hope of achieving some sort of clam epiphany. As you can see here, they are indeed photogenic. But in our opinion, these blue-collar cousins of Clams Casino came about as a way to stretch a few tough clams and use up some of those beach cottage kitchen staples before the rental week was over.

Sadly, we have to conclude that combining chopped mollusk meat with breadcrumbs, seasonings,* and fat (in some recipes enough butter to flood the Ocean State), doesn’t show Mercenaria mercenaria any respect… And respect, as all our readers know, is what the food of Wise Guys demands.

We don’t have a problem with the individual elements of the generic baked stuffie so much as we do with the smothering of perfectly innocent clams. So we’ve taken the most basic ingredients and left each to play its role in a dish that we think any stuffie lover will also enjoy. Viva le vongole!

Pasta alle Vongole in Bianco con Pangrattato e Gremolata
Pasta with Clams and Breadcrumbs

Ingredients:

1 Lb. Linguine
Olive oil
2 Large cloves garlic, peeled and minced
Freshly-ground black pepper
1 tsp. peperoncini (red pepper flakes) more or less to taste
1/2 Cup dry white wine
1 Cup chopped clams, with up to 3/4 cup of their liquid (Use fresh or canned clams.)
2/3 Cup unseasoned fine, dry bread crumbs
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Freshly-grated zest of one lemon
One lemon, quartered

Preparation:

Heat a large pot with four to six quarts of salted water to a full, rolling boil. Add the linguine, stirring as it goes into the water. Cook until the pasta has reached the al dente state, then drain in a colander.

Meanwhile, as the water comes to the boil, heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, then add enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Add the garlic, peperoncini, and a few grinds of black pepper. Sauté for a minute or two until the garlic begins to release its fragrance.

Raise the heat to high and add the wine. Allow the wine to boil for a minute or two to evaporate the alcohol.

Add the clams with their liquid and reduce the heat to medium-low.

Slide the drained pasta into the sauté pan. In 2-3 batches, sprinkle in the the breadcrumbs, lemon zest, and parsley. With a pair of tongs or two wooden spoons, gently combine the strands of linguine with the clam and breadcrumb mixture, coating the pasta as evenly as possible.

To Serve:

Divide the pasta equally among shallow bowls and serve, garnished with lemon wedges.

Serves four.