With clam sauce is one of the most popular ways to serve up spaghetti, and rightly so: it's tasty, and easy to make if you have a can or jar of clams. Tastier still if you have frozen clams, which I find similar in flavor and texture to live clams, though not quite as rich.
The one thing neither canned clams nor frozen clams have is clam shells, which might strike you as a funny thing to get excited about -- after all, you don't EAT them -- but they do contribute considerably to the appearance of the dish, and it is also fun to delicately lift the shells and suck the clams from them. And this is why Italian restaurants often use live clams in their clam sauces, and why you'll find sacks of live clams on ice in just about every well stocked Italian market.
They are well worth the extra time they require.
Some clam sauces, and more:
- Spaghetti with clams in a white, tomatoless sauce
- Spaghetti with clam sauce alla Viareggina, which has tomato
- Spaghetti allo Scoglio has all sorts of shellfish
- Not Pasta? Ligurian Rice with Clams
- How to prepare live shellfish
Comments
I hadn’t thought about leaving the shells there for people to slurp the clams directly from shell…duh! To me, having the shells there seemed like the dish was unfinished — thank you so much for putting clam shells in perspective for me, Kyle!
It’s not the same without the shells! Like many others, I use the shell of one clam as tweezers to take the clams out of their shells, satisfyingly tactile!