The butter/cream/olive oil debate.

Two things make me cry in Italian restaurants outside Italy (even worse, if you see these instances IN Italy - events deserving of instant annihilation): Cream in seafood pasta sauces and cream in carbonara sauce. For some reason the first is extremely popular in the UK, even in places that really should know better. Thankfully, the more culinarily aware Britain has become over the last ten years means this practice is slowly disappearing especially with the rise of good, relatively authentic cheap Italian chain eateries bringing back traditional, simple recipes to the high street menu. Cream in carbonara sauce is a hangover from the days when we bought Mother's Pride/Dolmio jars of italian sauces all of which were either based around sloppy tomato soup or béchamel made with double cream and designed to drown the pasta and provide the same kind of junk-food craving jitters you get when you have 3 a.m munchies. With the Jamies, Carluccios and Locarellis of this world publishing more cookbooks and launching more tv shows than you can shake a stick at, there's no excuse to still be aspiring to supermarket jar sauce....

Noticing a plate of "linguine con vongole" on a menu followed by the description "delicious long pasta served with clams, garlic, parsley and a creamy sauce: an authentic amalfi coast dish" prompted me to clear up the issue of carbonara, seafood sauces and the butter/cream versus olive oil debate.

Italian cuisine/the mediterranean diet revolves around the concept of the the freshest ingredients, used in season, cooked as simply as possible in order to allow the individual flavours of each and every component to be tasted. Simplicity and freshness are key, then. So if you catch a glimpse of a jar of clams anywhere near the kitchen you're eating in, run away, or order something other than spaghetti con vongole.

Good fresh seafood should by rights be so flavourful on its own and is already rich, there is no need to smother the flavours with cream or butter. The only reason you would see a clam or seafood sauce served with cream is because the seafood isn't really as fresh as it should be, or it's frozen and rather tasteless, or the chef has never been to Italy in his life. 

Spaghetti con le vongole is one of the greatest dishes in terms of how well it shows off the essence of the mediterranean diet and Italian cuisine. Usually served in bianco (which means without tomatos, NOT with cream), or with fresh, barely cooked cherry tomatoes. Although some of the clams will be taken out of their shells before serving, it is customary to served the spaghetti with quite a few clams still in their shells on top and a side-plate for diners to put their empties on. Apart from showing that the clams are indeed fresh and not out of a jar, its pretty to look at and the shells carry the juice and/or tomato sauce. Garlic, olive oil, parsley and clams are pretty much the only things that should be going into this dish. If the above are all of good quality, there is no need to disguise those great flavours with anything else. This applies to most seafood which doesn't benefit from being dulled with rich cream.

Click here for both recipes: spaghetti con le vongole in bianco/con pomodoro.

Italian do, of course, use butter and cream. For cooking, the VERY general trend is butter in the North, Olive oil in the south. However, olive oil is ubiquitous and even in the North, it is generally cheese-based sauces or dishes which are enhanced with cream and/or butter. When you think of Sud-Tirol or Trentino, with its fontina cheese, speck, gorgonzola, knaderle and spatzle, you hardly think of oilve oil... But then, you'd hardly think of spaghetti with clams either. Butter wasn't used at all in the south of Italy until very recently, after the second world war. It was expensive to make or to buy, and even though it is now available, it simply doesn't suit most of the ingredients found in the southern Italian diet nor the way they are traditionally prepared and cooked: Aubergines, zucchini, peppers, bitter greens, broccoli, fish, pulses and seafood. Cheese is used abundantly: buffalo mozzarella, burrata, caciocavallo etc. but butter is largely ignored, except in cake making.

Olive oil, naturally, boasts health properties that butter simply does not, it is rich in flavour and comes in a wide variety of flavours: nutty and smooth, bitter and acidic, apply, light and sweet, each of which lends its own quality to a particular dish making it a component in a dish's flavour as important as any of the other ingredients.

Carbonara sauce does not contain cream. Some add butter, but many skip even this. I have had Brits ask me: but in Italy, the carbonara is so creamy, if you did it without cream the egg would go all lumpy and dry. The only reason this happens is because usually the egg is cooked too long and over too high a heat when it is added to the pasta. For a great, creamy carbonara, packed with flavour, use fresh, free-range eggs and don't add salt (there is salt in the pasta cooking water and the pancetta) as it causes the eggs to become watery before you add them to the pasta. Add the egg when you've drained the pasta, turned off the gas and put the drained pasta back in the still hot pan. Now add the egg, stir gently, using the residual heat from the pan to lightly cook the egg as you turn it and mix it in with the pasta using a spoon or pasta tong. The egg will continue to cook even as you serve as it is in contact with piping hot pasta. This should give you delicious, creamy, light carbonara, without hurting your waistline, losing the flavour of the pancetta, nor resulting in lumpy egg!!!