The Rialto Fish Market in Venice gets going a little later than you might expect. If you're familiar with Billingsgate in London, for example, which opens at 4am, Venetian fishmongers may seem casually nonchalant as they unpack their wares, cigarette balanced on a bottom lip and the air thick with conversation in the twang of the local dialect.
Rialto wakes up around 7am and most stallholders are ready by 8am. Even so, it's still best to get there as early as you can while the fish are so spankingly fresh that you might still see the odd tail flip or mouth twitch.
Inside Rialto: Venice's famous fish market
I love getting there before the crowds to watch the stalls being covered with crushed ice and the sleek lagoon-caught sea bass, shimmering sardines and monster John Dory being laid in elegant rows. It's also the best time to see the local superstar chefs – Francesco Pinto from All'Arco or Bruno Gavagnin from Alle Testiere – inspecting the catch and deciding what goes on the day's menu. These perfectionists don't just order five kilos of this, or ten fillets of that. They actually identify and choose the specific fish that they want for the restaurant as if they were selecting jewels or flowers.
In addition to the generic varieties of fish you'd see in any Mediterranean fish market, the stalls at Rialto also feature some special delights from the lagoon. The terrifying local eel known as bisato, small monkfish the size of a child's hand called code di rospo ('toad tails') and the celebrated soft shell crabs, moeche, that appear for only a few weeks every spring and autumn. Occasionally you will see a price label with the name of the fish and the word nostrane. This means 'local' or 'ours' and I always fancy there is a significant sense of pride attached to that word.
I am here with a very specific purpose: to pick up the main ingredient for one of the hero dishes of regional Italian cooking, spaghetti alle vongole. The recipe isn't Venetian, but it has been embraced by the city and its inhabitants as if it were a true daughter of Venice's culinary heritage. The dish offers a thrilling flavour of the sea and a briny celebration of clams.
Seafood dishes and Aperol in Venice, Italy
A gondola near Rialto, Venice's famous fish market
Liubov Ilchuk
There are many different clams on display, and while all delicious, not all are fit for purpose. There are the delightful cape lunghe or razor clams, perfect with garlic and parsley. I also love the tiny, delicate telline, no bigger than a fingernail but packed with flavour.
However, I need what Venetians call vongole veraci – 'true clams' – known in other parts of Europe as pallourde. These plump, juicy bivalves are just perfect when combined with olive oil, white wine, garlic and parsley. I buy a kilogram, helpfully contained in a tightly bound net and head back to my small rented apartment just off Campo Santa Margarita in the Dorsoduro district.
Like all regional recipes, spaghetti alle vongole varies depending on where in the country you eat it. Most experts agree its origins are in Campania but it has a strong presence in Genoa and Venice, too.
The addition of tomatoes in the south troubles me a little and I have grown to love the Venetian bianco version so much that tomatoes or chilli seem like aberrations.
After scrubbing and rinsing the clams thoroughly, I tend to leave them in cold water for a few hours to allow any small grains of sand to filter out as each little fellow opens its shell slightly to see what's going on outside.
When I'm ready to cook, the process is usually pretty fast and frenetic. You have to move quickly to make sure this dish is at its absolute best when it gets to the table. The live clams need to hit the hot oil hard and keep moving as the wine evaporates, the shells open and the other ingredients incorporate to create the sauce.
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It's a subtle liquor that coats the strands of cooked spaghetti as you combine the pasta with the clams, a jamboree of olive oil, wine, pasta cooking water and garlic, but also including the tiny amounts of sea water that each clam releases as it opens.
The aroma when cooking spaghetti alle vongole is quite intoxicating, but I am always equally thrilled by the clouds of boozy steam, the hiss of the hot pan, and the clattering of the clams.
When the pan makes it out of the kitchen and the bounty is divided, there usually follows a quiet period as the eating begins, the sated silence broken only by the crunch of bread, the slurp of wine and, yes, the clattering of those clam shells again, this time satisfyingly empty...
Craving pasta after that read? Check out Foodism's pick of the best pasta restaurants in London or London seafood restaurants to try ASAP.
