When I first moved to Manhattan as a young adult [mumbles number of years ago] we used to go to Little Italy every so often. Even then it had started shrinking and become more of an Epcot-like experience than an organic ethnic neighborhood, but there were still plenty of decent places to go where other, older diners lapsed into Italian and the food was a little better and a little cheaper. The trick was to avoid the places with touts outside trying to hustle you in, those were the tourist traps, and try to find the places where you got the feeling that they didn’t really want you. That was just from the outside, though (except for the “social clubs;” they really didn’t want you) and once you were seated you and your group were rewarded for your discernment and could spend hours drinking cheap table wine and letting the waiters just bring you food (seven small courses wasn’t uncommon) and, if the spirit moved you, sing along to “La donna è mobile” if you kind of knew at least a few of the words.
Sigh.
This is the kind of food you would have found. It’s easy and pretty quick to make and if you’re having people over it is simple to scale up to feed a crowd. This makes enough for the two of us with maybe a little left over. For a normal human: supposedly feeds four.
Ingredients:
4 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 (15 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1⁄2 cup fresh parsley, or 1 tbs dried parsley
1⁄4 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried basil
1⁄2 teaspoon salt
16 ounces minced clams, with liquid
1 lb linguine
1 tablespoon lemon juice
How to:
Heat butter and olive oil in pan over medium high heat.
Add garlic and cook till garlic is golden, about 3 minutes.
Add parsley, oregano, basil, tomatoes, and salt to pan, mixing well.
Add undrained clams.
Bring mixture to a boil.
Simmer for 5 minutes; more if you think the sauce is too watery for your liking.
Cook pasta according to directions; drain.
Add lemon juice to sauce, cook for 1 minute.
Put pasta on platter and toss with sauce. Or do what I do, which is to dump the sauce into the pasta pot with the drained linguine and mix it in there and then ladle it out on plates.
That sounds easy and delicious! Che buono!
I’m guessing a lot of true Nonnas make theirs pretty much just like this.
Definitely add the pasta to the sauce pot and let it keep heating and soak up the juice for a minute.
The true Nonna would shuck her own clams (or make a long-suffering daughter-in-law do it) and dice her own tomatoes that she had bought earlier that day after much haggling in the village open-air market, and the sauce would take at least an hour.