Creamy seafood pasta

Method

1. Dry the seafood and get everything to hand. Pat the prawns and fish thoroughly dry on paper. This sauce comes together in about eight minutes and there is no point in the middle where you can go and chop a shallot.
2. Start the pasta. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to the boil. The spaghetti goes in when the sauce is under way, and it wants to arrive at the pan a minute short of al dente. Save a mugful of the water before you drain.
3. Open the mussels separately. Put the mussels in a wide pan with a splash of the wine, cover, and cook over high heat for 3 to 4 minutes, shaking once, until they open. Tip them into a bowl and pour the liquor through a fine sieve: that liquor is the best-tasting thing in this dish and it is full of grit if you do not strain it. Discard any mussel still shut. Shell most of them, leaving a few in the shell.
4. Sear the prawns and fish. Heat the oil in a wide skillet over high heat. Sear the prawns for about 1 minute a side, until just opaque, and lift them out. Lay the fish in and give it 2 minutes without touching it, turn once, and lift it out too. Both are underdone at this point and will finish in the sauce.
5. Build the sauce. Drop the heat to medium. Add the butter, shallot, garlic and chilli and cook 2 minutes until soft and fragrant but not coloured: browned garlic will run through the whole dish. Pour in the rest of the wine and the strained mussel liquor and let it reduce by half.
6. Add the cream and the tomatoes and simmer 3 to 4 minutes, until it thickly coats the back of a spoon. Stir in the parmesan off the boil.
7. Bring it together. Add the drained spaghetti to the pan with a good splash of the pasta water and toss hard for a minute, so the starch in the water and the fat in the sauce emulsify and the sauce grips the strands. Loosen with more pasta water rather than cream: this is the step that decides whether you get a sauce or a puddle.
8. Return the seafood last. Fold in the prawns, fish and mussels and give it 30 seconds, no more, just to heat through. Off the heat, add the lemon juice and basil, taste for salt, and serve at once with more parmesan.

Notes

• Cheese with seafood. An Italian cook would not put parmesan near shellfish, and the restaurant plate this came from was buried in it. Both positions are defensible. Serve it on the side and let the table decide.
• Do not cook the seafood twice. Every rubbery seafood pasta comes from the same mistake: everything simmering in the sauce from the start. Sear, remove, build, return. The 30 seconds at the end is all it needs.
• Frozen prawns are fine and often better than tired fresh ones. Thaw them fully and dry them very well, or they will steam rather than sear and water the sauce down.
• Without mussels. Use 200 ml of fish stock in place of the mussel liquor and add another 150 g of prawns. It is a simpler dish but a good one.
• Leftovers. Poor. The pasta drinks the sauce and the seafood toughens on reheating. Cook what you will eat.

Ingredient substitutions

• Firm white fish. Cod, halibut and hake all hold together. Avoid anything thin and delicate like sole or plaice, which disintegrates the moment it meets a tossed pan.
• Dry white wine. Any crisp unoaked white. If you skip it, replace with fish stock and an extra 10 ml of lemon juice, since the sauce needs the acid to cut the cream.

Sources consulted

• Serious Eats: pasta with shrimp in cream sauce
• BBC Good Food: how to cook mussels

Good with

• Grilled veg and chickpea pasta salad
• Italian-style marinara tomato sauce
• Mixed mushroom and porcini risotto

From Christoph Mayer

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