Spaghetti alle vongole fujute

This dish has a funny name, spaghetti alle vongole fujute, which means “spaghetti with clams that ran away” in Neapolitan dialect. And it has a funny origin story as well.

The famous Neapolitan stage and film actor Eduardo de Filippo, the story goes, came home from the theater one night in 1947 planning to make spaghetti alle vongole, only to find he didn’t have any clams in the house, so he just went ahead and made the dish without them. Eduardo claimed, despite the absence of its star ingredient, he could still taste and smell the sea. The power of suggestion, I guess. Thanks to his fame, the story spread far and wide and soon the dish became a local favorite.

Spaghetti alle vongole fujute is similar in concept to another Neapolitan dish, genovese fujuta, also known as finta genovese, a version of the famous braised beef and onion sauce called la genovese made without the meat. Yet another more distant cousin is the Tuscan meatless meat sauce called sugo scappato also known as sugo finto. Indeed any dish dubbed “fujuto/scappato” or “finto” will usually refer to a missing ingredient. Usually, it’s a vegetarian or vegan version of a dish normally made with meat or fish.* (Scappato is standard Italian for “escaped” or “ran away” or, more liberally translated, “gone missing”. Finto means “fake”. )

These dishes are examples of the Italian knack for getting by in a pinch, l’arte d’arrangiarsi as immortalized in the eponymous classic movie. In the kitchen this means making something tasty out of whatever you find in the cupboard. Back in 1947, it was a way of coping with post-war deprivations, so when Eduardo invented his now famous pasta, he was just doing what milllions of other Italians, especially in the south, would be doing on the daily.

In these more prosperous times, dishes like spaghetti alle vongole fujute, though born out of necessity, remain as popular as ever. They’re a boon for vegans and vegetarians, of course, but they continue to delight us all.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

• 500g (1 lb) spaghetti
• 500g (1 lb) cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, peeled and slightly crushed
• 1 hot red pepper, preferably fresh, seeds removed and thinly sliced
• A good handful of fresh parsley, stems removed and leaves finely minced
• salt
• olive oil

Directions

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Salt well and add the spaghetti. Cook until just slighlty underdone.

While the pasta is cooking, gently sauté the garlic along with the parsley stems (and the hot pepper if using) over low heat just a few moments, until the garlic is fragrant and slightly browned around the edges.

Raise the heat and add the tomatoes and let them sauté over moderate flame until they’ve just begun to wilt. Remove the garlic and parsley stems.

When the pasta is slightly underdone, transfer to the sauté pan with the sauce along with most of the minced parsley and a ladleful of pasta cooking water. Toss until the pasta is fully cooked and the sauce clings nicely to the pasta.

Serve immediately topped with the remaining minced parsely and a drizzle of olive oil.

Notes on spaghetti alle vongole fujute

Spaghetti is the classic choice for vongole fujute, but the thinner vermicelli or the thicker spaghettoni or linguine also work very nicely. So would fresh scialatielli. Really any long pasta you might use to make a seafood pasta would work well here.

And if you want lean into the Neapolitan origins of this dish, look for pasta from Gragnano, the hill town outside of Naples often dubbed the capital of Italian (dry) pasta. Garofalo, perhaps best selling Gragnano pasta brand, is becoming increasingly common where I live, even in regular supermarkets. Other brands from Gragnano I have found either locally or online include Faella, Afeltra and Gerardo di Nola. I also find Rummo, from Benevento in the Campanian hills, superb. It has a special place in my in my heart since Angelina was from a little hilltop town outside Benevento.

The amount of tomato varies wildly among recipes. In some, you just throw in a few token tomatoes or none at all. In others you add as much tomato as pasta by weight and in one recipe I’ve seen, double the weight. My personal preference is the 1:1 ratio given here. The tomatoes adds plenty of color and flavor, without making it an actual tomato sauce.

The addition of hot pepper is said by some to be original, but you can leave it out if you don’t care for spicy dishes. To my taste, a fresh hot pepper, cut into thin slices, is best, but you can also use a whole dried hot pepper or even red pepper flakes. If using the latter, do be careful as they burn very easily. I’d actually hold back until you add the tomatoes; their moisture should prevent them burning.

One thing almost all recipes have in common: lots of parsley, which adds both color and aroma. I may have lavished a bit too much on my pasta here, but you get the idea.

Variations

If you’re feeling a bit lazy, you can start off making the sauce for your vongole fujute by sautéing the garlic, pepper, parsley stems and tomatoes all at once. This avoids any risk of burning the garlic or the pepper. That said, I do like the extra depth of garlic flavor that comes from briefly sautéing the garlic first.

In one common variation, which some say is the original recipe, you start the sauce by sautéing a soffrito of parsley and garlic minced together. The soffritto provides deeper flavor, or so they say, but your parsley will lose its bright green color. If go you this route, be careful about not burning the garlic. Add the cherry tomatoes and some pasta water as soon as the garlic is lightly browned.

Some chefs like Peppe Guida like to risottare the spaghetti. That’s to say they will cook it directly in the pan with the sauce and add water as needed, as if they were making a risotto. One of my favorite Italian YouTubers, Mimmo Cioccione, adds his pasta to the pan partially cooked and finishes it off in the sauce. This produces a rather creamy pasta, not from cream, of course, but from the starch in the pasta. I like to cook the pasta until slightly underdone. Then I toss it in the skillet just a minute or two until cooked. This, to me, is the best of both worlds.

If you want to ‘cheat’ a little to add actual seafood flavor, you could add a few anchovies to the sauce. Or for a special treat, you might add a sprinkling of bottarga or a drizzle of colatura di alici to the finished dish.

The OG way to make vongole fujute…

Back in the day, some Neapolitan cooks would take the recipe a bit further and—believe it or not—throw some beach pebbles to sauce. This would lend some real, not imagined, briny flavor to the sauce. They would (obviously!) remove them before serving the pasta. This recipe from chef Guido Peppe Guida really leans into this idea with not only beach rocks but a few spoonfuls of sea water as well. Indeed, you will still hear some old timers say it’s not really a vongole fujute without them…just a plain old aglio e olio to which you’ve added a few tomatoes. But I’d guess this is a minority opinion.

If you want to try this out, you obviously need to be careful about sourcing. Here in the US, you can actually find Mexican sea pebbles fairly easily at hardware stores. They are used for decorative purposes I’m not sure they’re edible and frankly not very interested in finding out…

Eduardo de Filippo

Eduardo de Filippo, often called just Eduardo, was one of the giants of the Italian stage and screen in the 20th century. He was both an actor and playwright who wrote in his native Neapolitan dialect. He was born in 1900 and died in 1984. Dubbed the “king” of Neapolitan theater, he is probably best known outside Italy vicariously through Vittorio De Sica’s film Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style) starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, which was based on Eduardo’s play Filumena Marturano. He also starred in De Sica’s L’Oro di Napoli along side Totò, Sophia Loren and De Sica himself, among others.

De Filippo was quite the buongustaio. Besides vongole fujute, he is also credited with inventing another popular Neapolitan pasta called spaghetti del saponaro, which is on my to do list for a future post. And there were others, it would seem. His wife postumously compiled stories about his adventures in the kitchen in a memoir entitled Si cucine cumme vogl’ i’ (“You cook the way I want”). I haven’t read it yet, but you know I will. It might just inspire even more future posts. Stay tuned…

* One notable exception is the dish called uccellini scappati. The name means “little birds gone missing”. In this dish, you cook the typical pork stuffing for game birds on its own sans bird. Hardly vegan.

Print Recipe

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Spaghetti alle vongole fujute

Spaghetti with clams that got away

Total Time30 minutes mins

Course: Primo

Cuisine: Campania

Keyword: easy, pasta, quick, vegan, vegetarian

Servings: 6

Ingredients

• 500 g 1 lb spaghetti
• 500 g 1 lb cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half
• 2-3 cloves of garlic peeled and slightly crushed
• 1 hot red pepper preferably fresh, seeds removed and thinly sliced
• A good handful of fresh parsley stems removed and leaves finely minced
• salt
• olive oil

Instructions

• Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Salt well and add the spaghetti. Cook until just slighlty underdone.
• While the pasta is cooking, gently sauté the garlic along with the parsley stems (and the hot pepper if using) over low heat just a few moments, until the garlic is fragrant and slightly browned around the edges.
• Raise the heat and add the tomatoes and let them sauté over moderate flame until they’ve just begun to wilt. Remove the garlic and parsley stems.
• When the pasta is slightly underdone, transfer to the sauté pan with the sauce along with most of the minced parsley and a ladleful of pasta cooking water. Toss until the pasta is fully cooked and the sauce clings nicely to the pasta.
• Serve immediately topped with the remaining minced parsely and a drizzle of olive oil.

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