Spaghetti alle vongole in bianco

Spaghetti with clams in a white sauce

Published originally on my blog on 25 August 2013

I think I’ve had enough of my little expat kitchen. I don’t mean this one here of course, but my actual little expat kitchen, the room in my apartment that is small, bursting at the seams with things I have accumulated over the years, the kitchen that drives me crazy because I need.more.space. If anyone but me dares to take even a single plate out of one of my cupboards, they’ll most certainly end up with a dozen other plates on their heads. You need to be dexterous and somewhat of a magician to handle the overcrowded chaos that is my kitchen.

Also, we rent our apartment, and in most cases here in the Netherlands, big city apartments have small, nay, tiny kitchens that most of the time come with the electrical appliances, which is not a good thing. No one who rents buys the major appliances, which means that you get stuck with some that may be old, dysfunctional and, well, impractical. Such is the case with mine.

The oven is too small, too old and heats in patches. The refrigerator is small, with a rickety shelf (that’s kind of my fault) and a tiny freezer. The gas stove is, you guessed it, small, and for the last couple of weeks the bigger gas ring is not working (that’s not my fault). I may have some fancy pots and pans but I can’t use them.

This situation has taken away my will to cook. For this and various other reasons, we have been thinking of moving for a long time now, but it’s not that easy because I can’t find an apartment with a kitchen that I like. Yes, it’s come to this, the kitchen is the only room in a house that matters to me.

Anyway, I could go on and on about this for a looong time, so let’s get down to what’s important here. The food. I only needed the two gas rings in my kitchen that work for this, so I put them to good use and made a fantastic spaghetti alle vongole, that classic Italian, or Neapolitan to be exact, dish that truly is breathtakingly delicious in its simplicity.

The most important ingredient is of course the vongole (clams), and you need to buy them fresh, don’t use canned or bottled ones, unless you want to ruin the dish. The sweet, supple vongole, with that fresh, intense aroma of the sea is what this dish is all about. As for the rest of the ingredients, you most probably already have them in your kitchen; spaghetti, garlic, olive oil, white wine, dried red chilli flakes, fresh parsley.

As soon as we sat on the table, I couldn’t stop devouring the plump, briny flesh of the bivalves, swiftly twirling the spaghetti around my fork, slurping on any stray strand that had the audacity to resist getting into my mouth, dunking my bread into the aromatic sauce with the light acidity from the white wine, with the chili that tingled my palate and the garlic, present but not overpowering.

This ultimate taste of summer, just before its unofficial end, was exactly what I needed and it made me realize that I may not have the kitchen of my dreams, but what I create in it can be, at times, dreamy.

Spaghetti alle vongole in bianco - Spaghetti with clams in a white sauce

The Italians prepare this dish in two ways: a) in rosso, meaning in a red (tomato) sauce and b) in bianco, meaning in a white sauce without tomato. I prefer the second version of the dish as in my opinion, tomatoes overpower the flavor of the little mollusks.
By the way, the broth-like juices are essential in the dish, so make sure to have some bread to soak them all up.