Marine Biologist Food – Spaghetti with Clams

I have a degree in marine biology. Well, technically it’s a Master’s degree in Marine Environmental Sciences. There are many benefits of going to school for marine science. You get to check out all kinds of really cool things in the oceans and along the coast. You’re always near the water. You get to go out on boats. And there’s always seafood available. The problem is that when I’m on a boat, I get seasick, and decades ago when I was in school, I didn’t like a lot of seafood. Ha! A marine biologist who gets seasick and doesn’t like seafood. What a waste. But I always tried.

As an undergraduate when friends were doing semesters abroad in Columbia and Kenya and Europe, I did an intensive semester-long marine science program at Oregon State University. We lived on a peninsula in dorm-like apartments at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. Every day as part of the program we would visit field sites to learn about the diverse and beautiful marine ecosystems and organisms along the Oregon coast. Every day a few fellow students and I would scan the sites to see what we could bring home for dinner. We were poor. We found cockles in the mud flats and mussels along the rocky shorelines. Some friends would go fishing and we had “exclusive” rights to the dock at the Center (at least at night when no one else was around) where we caught Dungeness crabs. I remember staying up late one night picking a huge bowl of crab meat; it must have added up to three pounds by the time we finished. We ate it in crab cakes and salads and it was sweet and delicious. (Hint: Don’t try to keep undersize Dungeness crabs you’ve trapped. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officers are no joke, plus you want the crabs to get large enough to have reproduced at least once to keep stocks viable.)

As a graduate student my Master’s research was on bay scallops in shallow, calm bays on the east end of Long Island. We would scuba dive all summer long in eelgrass beds, five feet under-water, tethering juvenile bay scallops the size of a quarter to the grass blades to see what ate them. We could not eat the bay scallops because the fishery had collapsed; that’s why we were doing the research. But hard shell clams (quahogs, littlenecks, cherry stones, depending on size) live burrowed in the sediments below the eelgrass and in nearby sandy shoals. Sometimes my colleague Jim would pull a few out of the water, smash the shell with his dive knife, and sit on the boat eating them raw with his lunch. I’ve never been much for raw clams, but often when the day was done we would dig up a couple dozen from the sand or mud and take them home to make a garlicky clam sauce in which to drown pasta. It didn’t get much better than that.

I have expanded my seafood repertoire considerably since my time as a student. I eat calamari and many kinds of fish; I love mussels and shrimp; my wife taught me how to eat lobster and I am especially fond of lobster rolls; and I’ll even down one or two raw oysters if I can wrestle a few from my wife’s stingy hands. But one of my favorites is still spaghetti with clams.

Spaghetti with Clams

When I was very young my parents used to make spaghetti and clams for my brothers and me. At some point, we revolted and stopped eating them. Same with my own children; they ate it when they were young, but then came of an age when they turned their noses up at it.

Spaghetti with clams is undoubtedly better if you have fresh clams. This dish is still excellent if you only have canned clams. Since most people don’t have access to fresh clams, I give the recipe here using canned. If you do get fresh clams, the recipe is similar; after sautéing the garlic for a minute or so, throw scrubbed clams in the pot along with a bottle of clam juice (or a can or two of clams with their liquid) and wine. Then put a lid on until the clams open up and add the other ingredients. Either way – fresh or canned – spaghetti with clams makes a quick weeknight dinner that is ready in about as much time as it takes to boil a pot of pasta.

serves 2, 15 minutes

½ lb. spaghetti

1 Tbsp. olive oil

2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed

½ tsp. dried oregano

3 cans (6.5 oz.) chopped or minced clams, with liquid

⅓ cup dry white wine

1 tsp. hot sauce (such as Tabasco)

juice of 1 lemon

chopped flat-leaf parsley as garnish

grated Parmesan or Pecorino Romano cheese for serving

crusty bread for dipping

1. Cook pasta according to package directions and drain when done.
2. After you place pasta in the water, add olive oil to a 10-inch skillet and heat over a medium heat. Add garlic and oregano, stir, and sauté for about a minute. Do not let garlic brown.
3. Add clams, along with their juice to the skillet. Allow it to come to a simmer and cook for about two minutes.
4. Stir in white wine and allow it to cook for a few minutes until the sauce thickens slightly.
5. Add hot sauce and stir in. Turn heat to low and keep warm until pasta is finished cooking.
6. Immediately before serving stir in lemon juice.
7. Add drained pasta to sauce in the skillet and toss to coat. Serve hot.
8. Garnish with parsley. Pass around fresh cheese to be grated over the hot pasta. Serve with crusty bread to sop up all the juice.

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