In the Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS) 401 Winter 2022 semester class on Food, Gender, and Environment taught by Dr. Alex Ketchum, students are analyzing the ways that food accessibility and environmental threats are gendered, raced, and classed within the global context. As part of the course, students visited McGill’s archives and special collections to have a hands on experience with historical cookbooks (more on that here: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2022/02/class-visit-2022.html). The Special Series of Student Posts is a collection of student reflections on what information we can glean from cookbooks. .
Linguine Vongole
by Sydney Otoki
For my blogpost, I have chosen to discuss an Italian dish: Linguine Vongole. Linguine Vongole is a delicious pasta dish from Naples where clams are cooked in some white wine with garlic and chilli flakes, creating a delicious white wine sauce with the flavour of the clams.
I have chosen this recipe because of how personal it is to me but how I have come to realise that it touches upon lots of the various issues that we have discussed this semester.
I had linguine vongole (unknowingly) for the first time at a friend of mine’s house when I was in primary school. I used to refuse to eat anything that ‘came from the sea,’ but was also very polite and well raised so I was extremely anxious when I saw her dad bring bowls of pasta that were full of clams onto the living room table. My friend Leonora’s father, was an Italian man from Sicily who took quite a lot of pride and pleasure in cooking, so I knew I would have to appear extra satisfied with the dish. To my pleasant surprise, it turned out to be the best pasta I had ever had! When I asked her dad what the sauce was he told me it was a “blend of simple but perfect quality ingredients”at the time I found this entirely unhelpful.
Fast forward a few years, I (again) unknowingly had the dish with my parents one night on holiday. Because I was in a foreign country where I was not familiar with the language, I didn’t know what I was in for (for the second time now), and simply picked the cheapest item on the menu.
The pasta was so good that my mum and I zoomed in on the menu in pictures that she had taken of me to find the name of the dish, which is how we came to officially find out about Linguine Vongole. We tried to recreate it upon returning home, using an Italian recipe my mum found online. She refused to use the first few recipes that appeared in her algorithm, because they were mostly Jamie Oliver recipes which she claimed were ‘watered down’ and inauthentic because he isn’t Italian. I thought this was interesting. When my mum tried to recreate the dish back in London, it tasted nothing like the original, but delicious nonetheless. My mum admitted that she used less wine than her Italian source advised (one to one and a half cups), because the ‘non-authentic’ ones all advised to use drastically less (one quarter cup). But this isn’t where she believed the problem layed. She believed the problem to be the clams being drained of their internal juices. Something my mum has always complained about is that in the UK, seafood made available in mainstream supermarkets is thoroughly washed for consumers, which is convenient but can also strip the taste of the food in many cases. When we considered going to a fishmonger (who does not do this), we were deterred by the outrageous prices they were charging. This was interesting because while we did not face any trouble accessing the clams, in order to access “authentic tasting food” one must go to a fishmonger, which is particularly expensive in London. My mum and I agreed that this is an explicit way to force consumers’ arms, because if fishmongers don’t practise the “washing,” then this must be a calculated move.
Fast forward another couple years, I now find myself in Montreal, still seeking the amazing flavour of this dish. My partner and I decided to recreate the dish for the blogpost. It took trips to four different locations to find the clams. We both went to our respective closest supermarkets, Provigo and Metro in the Milton-Parc area, and found no clams. We decided to go to the Provigo on Mont-Royal because it is a big store with a large fishmonger aisle, so we assumed we would find them there, but we did not. We asked the gentleman if they had simply run out and if there was a time that we could come back and find some, but he said that because of the large student population of the Plateau, they do not order clams because it is assumed that students won’t buy them, so they focus on more common, cheaper fish like cod and salmon. This made me think of the concept of food apartheid and unequal access to food discussion that we had at the start of the semester. It made me reflect on how my nutritional intake is not really determined by my choices but the choices and calculations that strategists working for food distribution corporations have made for me.
The next best option was to go to the Atwater market because they had a fishmonger that clams on their website. The clams were unsurprisingly expensive, $32 for the two of us, but being a popular Montreal destination, this was to be expected.
We went home and proceeded to ‘purge the clams’ of sand by placing them in salt water for an hour, but they had visibly already been washed.
Below are some pictures of the clams cooking in the wine, garlic and chilli flakes. The final result is the picture on the right.
For an actual recipe to refer to, I requested to refer to a cooking blog that I use a lot, rather than a cookbook. The first reason is that I am a visual learner, and online cooking blogs can cater to this better. Second, I like that it is more community based because people can comment and make adjustments to the recipes. For instance, I used a different website to make my partner’s favourite dessert (Portuguese Natas), and a Portuguese man commented that they are better if the oven is at maximum capacity heat wise, and recommended sprinkling icing sugar and cinnamon on top of the pastry. I used these tricks for my second batch and they tasted really authentic.
The blog that I referred to for the Nata’s was the following: https://leitesculinaria.com/7759/recipes-pasteis-de-nata.html I got the suggestion to sprinkle cinnamon and icing sugar from the comments instead of the recipe! I feel as though cookbooks that seek to produce tons and tons of easy recipes alienate the small details that make recipes worthy of core childhood memories. The aspect of a recipe perpetually evolving and being refined by a community is very appealing to me. Another important factor to note here, is that making puff pastry from scratch was so difficult to me with all of the folding that I would,ve given up had there not been a visual component
As for measurements, my parents have often told me to not follow recipes precisely when you don't have the appropriate kitchenware, which as a student I do not. So we made two batches, a first round following the recipe for general guidance, and then a second making changes that we thought would better suit our ingredients. The second batch was much better. I think the difference is that the practice is far less mindless when someone tells you to put ‘just enough’ chilli peppers, as opposed to 2 teaspoons. This is when one adapts the recipe to one’s taste and creativity and care becomes a central component of the process. Online blogs allow people to share this aspect of cooking, all whilst having a general sense of direction.
However, this made me reflect on the fact that my partner and I not only had the opportunity to splurge on the clams, but to spend the time learning and enjoying the process of cooking, which we ourselves do not usually have the luxury of doing. This is where the importance of cookbooks came back into the picture for us, as an extremely valuable resource to literally help one sustain oneself. Not everyone can afford the luxury of accidentally burning all of the ingredients that they bought to feed themselves and their families. I myself have been deterred from cooking an array of meals for this very reason, and I am a privileged, food-secure individual. This is why the community aspect, that is both enormous in terms of reach, thanks to mass communication media, and intimate, because of the individual experiences that are brought to the blog, are a great resource, because good blogs are free, and do not take up any physical space.