Lavitola, Mieli and the clams. It’s all wrong: without shells, there’s no magic

Everyone is now jumping on the clam bandwagon. Menichini has posted an encrypted photo of a plate full of shells from the Cefalù restaurant, taken from Google. The PD is urged to leave the plate on the table and avoid making any further statements; it is embarrassing enough as it is. It is preferable to pretend you are not merely non-conformists but deceased.

A red fishing line links the only two news stories of the summer: the Ranucci-Lavitola love story, with the interview with Paolo Mieli on the one hand, and the clams dying out in the Adriatic on the other. Spaghetti and fake attacks. A ‘climate attack’ on the clams too, which are now as expensive as caviar. Tout se tient, though in an order I cannot quite define at the moment; yet I am certain that everything will soon become clear. So let us discuss matters I do know: spaghetti with clams. Some people know how to cook it, others do not. The detail cropped up in the big summer novel: when questioned about his relationship with Valter Lavitola, Mieli explained that he liked returning to his restaurant partly because they served him clams already shucked there, sparing him the effort. Lavitola was only too happy to play along with the mockery: he’d prepare them just like that, naked and mistreated on the plate, clams reduced to tiny, dishevelled buttons amongst the spaghetti. We will not be seeing spaghetti with clams very often anymore, or at least they will not be what they used to be: soon we will only have Atlantic clams, clams from cold seas – good for poets but not for seafood. Ocean clams taste of nothing, not even salt; we will read about shelled clams as one reads the "Iliad".

To shell or not to shell: that is not the question. Some do need shelling – to be tossed with the spaghetti in the final cooking water – but you cannot shell them all; that would be a shame. Most of the clams must arrive in their shells because the shell is the dish within the dish; it must be piping hot, all of it, to warm the part underneath – that’s how they do it in the restaurants of Naples, the greatest clam cooks. The shell remains to hold the sauce; it calls for your fingers and slows down the fork. It’s a two-part dish: spaghetti and clams. Those genuine ones (God rest their souls) are even difficult to pry open. I remember the clams of the old generation in those blue buckets at the fishmongers’ in Pozzuoli, submerged in water, defending themselves against intruders by opening a slit in their shell and squirting from their very long horns. You pay a premium for those, say the experts – they’re rare clams from the old mollusc aristocracy, and they’re no longer around. Clams with swagger, strong clams. Their shells used to be unbreakable; now you have to throw half the bag away – they seem as fragile as glass. Clams that follow the people who eat them.

The completely shelled clam belongs to the great contemporary civilisation of ‘facilitation through loss’, and the result – apart from being morally suspect – is also rather unsightly. Without the shells, you’ve stripped away the whole spectacle and half the flavour: the clam, in its final effort to survive, remains attached to the valves by filaments; those are its nerves, its muscles. That’s the magical fluid, and you break it up first? You might as well eat pasta with trout cheeks – I came across that years ago on Lake Como and I’m still wondering about it. I’d expect this from the Americans – indifference to the shell, treating it as scrap metal on the plate – but what about us?

Eduardo de Filippo would return home from the theatre in the evening and fancy some spaghetti with clams; if he didn’t have any clams, he’d prepare it with ‘fujùte’ (runaway) clams. Garlic, two tomatoes, and loads of parsley. He used to say that this way he could almost taste the sea, and he hardly noticed that there were no clams. I consider it a powerful metaphor – if only there were room, this summer, for other metaphors.