Sundays are for pasta

linguine and clams

I’ve been talking with an old friend recently, I’ll call him Tony. 

We went to highschool together and in high school we hung out, partied together, got in trouble together, tried to pass math together. He’s the son of the man who was my father’s business partner since the late 1940s. Tony is probably one of the only people I know outside my siblings who understood what it was like to grow up like I did, because he did, too. Also, the fascinating thing about Tony and I, even though we knew that we were living similar lives—we never, ever spoke of it. We just remained connected with this silent knowing, this secret we shared. This quiet understanding of the other.

After Tony’s father (my dad’s partner) died, my father became like a second dad to Tony and they had a relationship I really knew nothing about, nothing that I wasn’t part of, even though he was my friend.

I’ve been talking to Tony because my dad, in his typical trickster behavior, even in the realm of the dead, has pressed me to reconnect with him. My dad comes and giggles in my ear, tries to tickle my leg, and gives me little messages in the oddest ways that are translated as: there are some stories that need to be told. Tell them!

Call Tony, my dad said once through a series of birdsongs in the dead of winter outside my window. It was actually very loud and very clear. The next thing I knew I was on FB messages reaching out to this old friend of mine, asking to re-connect.

And Tony… he knows a lot of the stories. He witnessed some firsthand and some my father shared with him. And I love Tony, and he loves me. He’s more than happy to fill me in, to finally share a part of my father I never knew. Parts that Tony knows I need to hear, long to hear, to finally be part of. Tony knows I am trying to keep these stories alive.

Tony told me that after I left for college and went across the country to live and marry and raise babies—  he’d get regular calls from my dad, “Hey kid, come over to the house. I got something for ya.” 

“I’d get there and you dad would be making linguine and clams for me and him. He’d have an apron on. A bottle of wine opened.  And we’d eat and drink wine together, and then sometimes after we’d eat we’d go out to a bar and… and ya know, continue the night and get too drunk. I could tell you stories, MB, so many stories, it would take us until we are both in the grave to tell you all of them.” 

Talking to Tony on the phone these past couple weeks has literally made me piss my pants in laughter. These are classics stories, you can’t make these things up. Sicilians. Small city New York. It’s all in there. It also brings me twinges of sadness, like a feeling of being left out my whole life, being left out of this exciting, raunchy, unique, larger-than-life, life. Tony is also telling me about the business, a thing I know nothing about. He knows because he was part of it, too, eventually. They were bookmakers, my dad, and his dad. Bookies. The old school kind, ya know? What does it really even mean, to be a bookie? What does that look like on the micro? I have no clue.

Tony knows more about my father than I ever did. But also, what’s really beautiful is that Tony knows parts of me —by being so close with my dad—that many people can’t really understand. Our fathers ran one of the biggest and longest running business situations together, for over 45 years, and then after Tony’s father died, my dad continued until the weeks before he died.

A while back I was trying to write about collectivist culture and how my father really was an example of it. Him as an immigrant kid, running an underground economy network from an early age. And how being from these kinds of cultures, makes it really hard to navigate in the “outside” world. They way we collectivize is not forced, it doesn’t have to be created, it just is. And it really isn’t common, or usual, in our day to day in this current culture.

I couldn’t  put my finger on it, or how to explain it, but I’m getting there. My father was a community person. He was the front face of the business. He had to make a lot of friends, and a lot of people wanted to be friends with him. Also a lot of people had to be, in some ways, scared of him, because there was money on the line. But my father was not an intimidating man. He was a lover. He was engaging, funny, relatable, empathetic (one had to be when taking someones money away from them after a loss). My father knew everyone, took care of many of them, and spent a lot of time with all sorts of people outside our home, people who wanted to gamble with him. I mean the whole part of the job is to keep people wanting/needing to gamble. Trust me, I grapple with this. This is complicated. I am writing about this further, alone, trying to hash it all out.

My father wasn’t home home a ton (but he was always home for dinner, even if many nights he had to leave after dinner, he never missed sitting down with us for dinner). 

He had a whole life outside of his family. It was work, but it was his life. He meant something to people, all generations. Consider Tony. He’s my age. And my father was one of the closest people in his life. Yet I knew nothing of it, really. My father had to compartmentalize. There was his “work” life and those who were allowed to be part of that. And there was us, his family. Seven kids. That life. 

These two worlds were never really were brought together.

Sometimes I feel really sad about this, not knowing, not getting to be part of this, to know my dad in these ways, to experience and enjoy these parts, to get to be critical of these parts, to get to be encultured by it all. But I also know this— keeping these worlds separate— my father was just fiercely protecting us from what he did. I get that. I know that. He felt bad enough when the arrests would come and the paper would be filled with his name and we had to walk around with that kind of weight, shame, because trust me, it was unavoidable.

I also know that these two sides, these two compartments within him, family and his vocation,  were at odds with each other. He was a face of a very specific kind of community, an illegal one, one that didn’t always involve benign and innocent things. It was a certain kind of world. And his family was another world. And I think, in many ways, it tore him apart inside, plagued him, guilted him. But this is what he had, what he did. What was available to him in the cultural and economic situation he was born into.

My father was not the kind of father I saw in a lot of my friends' homes. He was the kind of guy who called Tony up and invited him over and made him spicy linguine and clams and told him stories about the old days.

I know my father loved his outside life — he became a legend, an almost 100 year old storytelling.

But I know he loved us more. 

And as much as I can look back and resent some of this, I don’t. Not at all.  Because I know he loved us more.

And also, I can relate. I can understand. And also, maybe because I am a lot like him, in my own way.

Okay, enough about all that. Trust me there is a lot more. But this was supposed to be about pasta. And it is.

And today it’s going to be linguine with clams. 

I’m going to tell you how my dad did it, and listen, my father was a simple kind of guy when it came to food. He learned Sicilian style Italian American cooking from his mother and it was always just simple things, potent flavors. Don’t try to show off. Just use what you have and make it good, filled with love and passion.

For this recipe you can use homemade fresh linguine, but my father never did. We had a good quality store-bought Italian import. 

You can go get some fresh clams and steam them and use their meat in this, but my father never did. He used Cento canned clams. 

He could whip up this dish in no time and it always tasted better than how most restaurants make it. 

What you need – this is a linguine with red sauce, by the way, and it can be made spicy as hell.

-Olive oil 

-Linguine 

-Source for red sauce - my dad liked one large can of San Marzano tomatoes (like the REAL kind, look for the official stamp) and a little bit of pureed tomato sauce of some kind. He would break down the San Marzanos in a bowl before using them, taking them from whole tomatoes to a crushed consistency.

-Sweet onion 

-Garlic (2-3 cloves)

-Can of clams (you can use 2 if you like it really clammy, but i don’t)

-Crushed red pepper

-Dried oregano 

-Dried basil 

-Salt 

-Grated pecorino romano cheese

This is my dad making the sauce probably around 1993ish. I don’t know. I am pretty sure that is me draining the pasta just outside the picture frame.

-In a large pan, heat up olive oil, add half a chopped sweet onion and a couple/few minced garlic cloves. 

-Let those slowly cook until softened. 

-Add dried oregano. Dried basil. As much crushed red pepper as you can handle. We can handle a lot. Salt. 

-Let that cook for a while. 

-Then add your clams (you don’t have to drain them) and stir them in. Cook for a few. 

-Add your tomato sauce (whole can of broken down san marzano and a cup of pureed tomatoes) 

-Turn on low and allow to simmer. Tasting. Adding what is needed. My dad always added a little sugar to his sauce, don’t shoot, I know it’s controversial, but he would put so much red pepper in, it was almost needed. He might also add a splash of red wine here and there. Making a sauce is like making love. It’s a process. Keep tasting and changing it and paying attention to it. Truly, it’s a beautiful thing when we give ourselves time to really make a sauce. 

-While the sauce is simmering, boil your pasta water with a shit town of salt in it. 

-Add pasta. 

-Cook al dente. 

-Save a wee bit of pasta water, ½ cup, for flavor

-Strain pasta. Add pasta to the simmer sauce with a little pasta water. Toss well. 

Serve big and large as my dad would. Top with a lot of grated pecorino romano cheese. Make sure you have some soft Italian bread so when you are getting down to the end, you can use the bread as scarpetta across the plate. Drink a nice Nero d’avola wine with this. Enjoy. 

Xx mb