(it looks a bit askew, but I wanted to save the piece of parsley)

 

I really love this dish, and please don’t tell the Italians, but nothing else works as well as a sort of mental ‘palate cleanser’ following a day or a sequence of days which had featured fairly rich meals.

• Italian-grain Afeltra spaghettetone from Eataly, cooked al dente, then tossed in a large, enameled cast iron pot in which two garlic cloves from Keith’s Farm, minced, and one crushed peperoncino had been heated in some olive oil before they were joined by cooked little neck clams from P.E. & D.D. Seafood, along with their cooking juices (the clams had been steamed open with a little water in a separate pot), the entire mix sprinkled with a bunch of parsley from Eataly, chopped, then served in shallow bowls
• slices of excellent sourdough bread from Rock Hill Bakehouse, in Gansevoort, NY, which is sold on Saturdays at the Union Square Greenmarket
• the wine was an Italian (Sicily) white, Corvo Insolia 2014
• the music was a number of classical-era symphonies by contemporaries of Haydn and Mozart; all of these works area seriously underappreciated today, Gossec, Vanhal, Manhaut, and Kraus, performed by Capella Coloniensis