Cooks and Books #1: Jovanka
Childhood dreams of spaghetti bolognese and a very coveted vongole recipe
Cooks and Books is a recurring sub-column that will spotlight chefs - aspiring, fledgling, experienced, retired (quite the gamut!) - with a story to share. Being the meddlesome and nosy person I am (much to the annoyance of family and friends eating out with me), I am often found peering my nose into the kitchens of restaurants, food carts, marketplaces, and friends’ homes trying to unearth some hidden mystery food tactic not yet privy to me. I am a very tactile person in the kitchen, and I ingest techniques best by watching, trying, failing to replicate, conjuring some sort of newfangled creation on my own…. But the point is that I love to watch and observe all kinds of chefs in the natural habitat. Food can teach us so much, and has become a very fundamental prism through which I filter culture, history, traditions and even, kinship. This column (which could take a Q&A interview style too) is meant to take us all on a proxy adventure in the kitchens of my friends, chefs and family - that way, we can all vicariously partake and savor the oil-sizzling, pan-flipping, dish-washing and, memory-making in the cucina.
I have the pleasure of having a dear, dear friend Jovanka to kick off this column with her sentimental throwback to “incorrectly” finished pastas (last I checked sauce, pasta and, starch-laden pasta water were supposed to say “I Do” and consummate a la Mantecare in the pan before serving right?… but I actually never ate pasta prepared this way at home as a child either) and a delicious Vongole pasta (that comes with suggested variations - this, I absolutely love) that will make you want to dash to the fresh market for some clams. Sadly that vongole veraci variety can be found nowhere else but Italy, as always. Jovanka, my younger sister Sonia (who you will hear from very soon…) and I go way back in New York when we were rookie college students eating at Basta Pasta by Union Square, or trying to replicate a pasta from them. Jo taught me so many things in the kitchen, and has such a beautiful, tender soul at the heart of it. Her inclination to cook stems from a strong innate desire to feed, care and love those around her - and every bite of her food carries those nuggets of affection. She is the one who taught me, loosely, to make pasta (while my extended time with Mirella further honed and expounded upon it), and till this day, I cook my vongole largely in the way she said to do so. I owe so much to her in our three-way friendship (along with Sonia and I combined), in the kitchen. (Funny story but one time during a trip to LA after our rental car unexpectedly got towed away, we had no choice but to severely punish ourselves by ordering less than three things on a menu at a restaurant we had been so thrilled to eat it for months. Lesson learnt: I’m never parking anywhere near DTLA ever again in this lifetime.) Anyway, I’m so thrilled we all can make spaghetti vongole the way Jo taught me to.
Spy little Jo here (seated in between her older siblings Jonny and Pri) - all smiles, of course - ever ready to heartily conquer the Spaghetti Bolognese.
As a kid my go-to pasta dish at any Italian restaurant was a hearty, generous portion of Spaghetti Bolognese. It was the first pasta I’d ever had. I first had the dish at this now-closed restaurant ‘Spageddies’. It was the dish I ate every birthday before I turned 13. I remember one birthday even revolved around a surprise that involved a lot of Spageddies’ Spaghetti Bolognese. I recall very clearly:
My dad picked me up from school on my birthday, April 23. Walking to the car, I asked him if we could go to Spageddies. He said, “No, let’s eat at home. Mbak cooked”. I tried not to sulk on my birthday and got off the car at home readying myself for a bowl of Soto Ayam, which my dad said was what’s for lunch. Not 3 seconds after I walked through my front door, my mom, sister, and brother sprayed me with confetti and led me to our dining table where I made out the most familiar and joy-inducing sight: a BIG BIG PORTION OF SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE from Spageddies!!
It was my childhood. It sounds like this recipe should be on Spaghetti Bolognese, but it’s not, because although I LOVE eating it, it’s just not something I have the time to cook very often, especially in college where I picked up cooking out of necessity but didn’t have a lot of time to spare.
One of my favorite grocery stores back then was H Mart – I’d visit it on my way back from work. One day I saw a bag of really fresh (and cheap) clams in the seafood section, and It made me recall the first time I tried the shellfish.
It was the day that my mom and I ate at Spageddies to celebrate getting my period. Since I was celebrating something that was meant to mark the beginning of ‘adulthood’, I thought I should order a cool-kid pasta and forget the Bolognese for once. My mom’s go-to order was vongole, and she was the coolest kid I knew, so that’s what I got that day.
Curiously, I picked up the bag of clams and walked towards the cashier with my head buried in my phone, searching up vongole recipes – maybe I could remake what I had that day at Spageddies. I picked up some parsley and white wine (I had everything else in my pantry) and headed home. That night I followed the recipe I found online, careful to properly clean the clams, saute the garlic and not burn them, steam the clams open and toss the dead ones, reduce the wine etc. It was surprisingly simple, and so tasty!
Once you have the basics, this dish becomes so versatile. I’ve since tried many different ways to make a vongole and I don’t think I’ve made this dish exactly the same twice. Despite how few ingredients there are, there are so many ways to play around with the ingredients and the way you cook the dish that result in very different outcomes. I’ve tried minced vs sliced garlic, pinot grigio vs sauvignon blanc, Littleneck clams vs the Batik clams that are more easily sourced in Indonesia, and linguine vs spaghetti (I still can’t decide which I like better, although personally for me, it has to be a dried pasta).
In the end, it’s just about how you play around with all of the combinations to end up with a vongole that’s to your liking. My favorite combination is below – it’s probably a far cry from the authentic version you find in Italy, but I personally like to make it this way!
Ingredients
Olive oil
Chili flakes
Garlic, minced
Parsley, finely chopped
Littleneck clams
Dried spaghetti or linguine
Sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio or any dry white wine I think
Salt and pepper
Method
Saute the garlic in a ton of olive oil. Something like half ½ tbsp of minced garlic per person/portion. I like to add a little salt to the garlic.
Add in your chili flakes and saute for a little longer.
Add in your white wine and let that reduce a little before adding in all of your clams.
Remove the clams as they open and set them aside - you don’t want them overcooked!
This step I like because I feel it makes the sauce a little more clammy – take ¾ of the clams out of the shell and toss it back into the sauce. The remaining ¼ in the shell left for garnish.
The sauce should be kinda watery with all the juice released from the clams! Taste the sauce!
Meanwhile, cook your pasta in salted water. If the sauce was super salty from the clam juice, you don’t really need to salt your water TOO much.
Once the pasta is a few minutes shy of al dente, grab a pair of tongs and lift the pasta from the pot of water straight into the sauce. Some pasta water should cling to your pasta and join the pot of sauce.
This step is important for a tasty, slurpy pasta – you want to mix your pasta vigorously with the sauce until the starch from the pasta and pasta water thickens the sauce, and until the pasta becomes one with the sauce.
Add more pasta water if your sauce is too thick, but remember to cook it out a little. Since you took the pasta out early, you have some time to cook it in the sauce until perfectly al dente!
Top with the remaining clams you left in the shell, some parsley, and serve.
Variations
Bottarga
The first vongole with bottarga I had was in Giorgio Baldi, in Santa Monica. It’s a delicious plate of pasta – perfectly savory with baby clams tossed in a garlicky, emulsified sauce (maybe a bit of butter?) and its ocean flavor boosted by a generous grating of salty, slightly funky bottarga. Unlike the lighter variations I had in Italy, but so incredibly tasty.
Cherry tomatoes
Sometimes I toss in some cherry tomatoes whole after the garlic goes in. It adds a little sweetness to the dish. Let the skin tear and some of the juices run out – not too much or the sauce becomes tomato-ey, unless that’s what you’re going for!
Sake and dashi
At one point the closest grocery store to my apartment in New York was Sunrise Mart at St. Marks. Desperate for vongole but unwilling to walk twice the distance to Whole Foods to get my ingredients, I headed to Sunrise Mart and made some substitutions to the recipe to accommodate what was available at the Japanese market: sake and dashi powder instead of white wine, shiso instead of parsley. It was delicious!
Recalling the nostalgic days we used to feast on this vongole directly from the pan to minimize subsequent dishwashing labor…
Thank you Jo! With that, this wraps up the first contribution to my Cooks and Books subcolumn! Funnily enough, I actually made two different pastas this past weekend (one of which happened to be the cherry tomato rendition above) and were a real hit. Hopefully, Jo’s warm childhood memory and wonderful recipe gift remedied some of your Monday Blues…!
Ciao,
Sarah