Spaghetti with Scungilli Sauce

I must admit, scungilli is pretty expensive. "Conchiglia" (plural: "conchiglie") in standard Italian means "conch," and the word "scungilli" developed from Neapolitan (Naples) dialect "scuncigli" (singular: "scunciglio"), a term for the edible meat from a conch. A conch is a type of sea snail in a hard, often colorful and interestingly shaped shell. Its texture is similar to clams, in my opinion. Scungilli is sold in cans of about 30 ounces, with the sliced scungilli in a briny type of broth that is used in the preparation of this dish. One can costs about $30, and it can be found in "some" supermarket specialty sections, Italian grocery stores and online.

This dish is spicy, but naturally you can regulate the spiciness. Please don't be afraid of anchovies, as they will melt and then easily combine into the sauce, but they will NOT provide the strong taste like the first (and perhaps, last) bite of anchovy pizza you had in your life.    

 

Ingredients (4 to 6 servings):

 

1 can sliced scungilli in broth (about 30 ounce can), drained and broth retained separately

4 tablespoons olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

4 anchovies, chopped

2 small fresh red chili peppers, chopped, or 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1/2 cup chopped fresh tomato

2 1/2 cups tomato puree 

1 cup scungilli broth (you probably won't need all of it)

1 teaspoon dried marjoram (or oregano)

1 teaspoon ground black pepper 

1 teaspoon salt

1 pound spaghetti

chopped parsley for garnish 

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet (or pan) over medium heat. Saute the garlic, chopped anchovies, chopped chili pepper (or chili flakes) and chopped fresh tomato. The anchovies will begin to dissolve, so keep stirring everything around. Saute these ingredients for about three minutes, then add the tomato puree, 1/2 cup of the scungilli broth, teaspoon of marjoram (or oregano), ground black pepper and salt. Bring the sauce to a steady, gentle simmer and adjust the temperature setting to maintain this simmer (I use "low"), cover with a lid or foil and gently simmer the sauce for 12 to 15 minutes, stirring the sauce every few minutes. Add and stir in the sliced scungilli, cover again and cook for 6 minutes, adding a little more of the scungilli broth, if the sauce is too thick, after 3 minutes. Remove the lid/foil and cook 2 or 3 minutes more. Garnish with chopped parsley. Cook the spaghetti according to the instructions of the brand you buy. I often, but not always, use fresh spaghetti, so it only takes a couple of minutes to cook. 

 

  

 

 

WORD HISTORY:

Travel/Travail-"Travel" and "travail" are compounds and they are really the same word. "Travel" is by far the more common word in English; but in fact, "travail" actually entered English first. Relatives of the first part of the words are "three," "third" and "thirty,'' all words from the Germanic roots of English, and to "trivial," a Latin word borrowed from that language. The second part is related to "page" (the noun meaning 'sheet of paper'), "pact" and "pale" (the noun with the most common meaning "stake, a part of a fence"), all Latin words borrowed by English from French. "Travel/travail" goes back to Indo European "pag," which had the notion of "fasten, join." This gave Latin "tripalis," which meant "held or connected with three stakes." This gave Latin "trepalium" (initially as "tripalium"), "a device (seemingly) of three pales used for torture," which spawned the verb "tripaliare," meaning "to torture," used figuratively to mean, "to labor, to toil." This passed to Latin-based Old French as "travailler," which meant "to torture, to toil," and this spawned the noun "travail" meaning "labor, difficult work;" thus also, meaning, "hard journey." The noun was borrowed by English in the middle part of the 1200s meaning, "toil, labor;" thus also, "child birth." The verb was borrowed as "travailen" circa 1300 meaning "to toil, to labor," but by the mid 1300s the "hard or difficult journey" meaning had also been added, which by the late 1300s had simply come to mean "to journey," and the spelling had changed to "travelen," which dropped the 'en" ending as English began to conjugate verbs differently. The noun developed circa 1400 from the verb. "Travel" eventually overtook the native English word "faran" (also spelled "feran"), which came from the Germanic roots of English, although numerous forms of the native English word are still used; for example, "wayfare," "farewell," "farebox," "warfare," "fare" (price for travel, but other meanings too).