Egremont— Some years ago, 1964 to be exact, before the Hamptons became the haven for the rich and fancy, I was invited by an army buddy to drive out to meet his new found friends in a place called Amagansett. Amagansett, never heard of it, but my friend urged me to discover this seaside village, a hundred plus miles from New York City, inhabited by fishermen, potato farmers, and as I was soon to learn, a colony of bohemian artists.
That’s where I met Anna Guglielmi, a woman three times my age, whose every other word contained four letters, beginning with F and ending with a K. Anna was the widow of O. Louis Guglielmi, a fine artist whose works now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as other museums around the world. Their fellow community of painters and writers had included Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine De Kooning, Larry Rivers, Julian Levy, and Lee Krasner. Most of them gone by the time I discovered Anna and Amagansett. Anna was like the den mother to them in the early years of their emergence, welcoming them all to her table for talk and her delicious food.
It was a special time in a special place where a fish, fresh from the sea, could be purchased for a dollar or two, in the early dawn from the fishermen that hauled back their nets from the ocean filled with striped bass, weakfish, blues, and fluke. I will forever remember Anna and her special use of the English language as she scrubbed clams, removed seaweed beards from mussels, and deveined shrimp – the ingredients of her seafood stew.
Seafood Stew
3/4 pound fish (cod, sword, or halibut,) cut into four equal slices
1/2 pound shell-on wild shrimp, vein removed
12 little neck clams, seaweed beards removed
12 mussels, seaweed beards removed
16 ounce can of diced tomatoes
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large sweet red pepper, sliced
6 medium cloves of garlic, chopped
1 small bottle clam juice
1 teaspoon Italian pepper flakes
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon salt
4 grinds of pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
Fresh Italian parsley, chopped.
Fresh baguette (I like the wonderful baguettes sold at Bizalion in Great Barrington.)
Scrub the clams before immersing them in water with a tablespoon of white vinegar for an hour or two, encouraging them to release any sand remaining in their shells.
In a large pot, warm the olive oil over a low flame, add the onion and sweet red pepper and sauté until the onions turn opaque. Add the chopped garlic and continue cooking for a minute or two.
Add the can of diced tomatoes, pepper flakes, oregano, salt, and pepper and continue cooking until ingredients begin to bubble.
Add clam juice and continue cooking on medium flame until it reaches an active boil.
Add all the clams, mussels, shrimp, and fish. Cover the pot, reduce the heat to medium-low, and continue cooking for 10 minutes.
Remove the lid. The clams and mussels should be opened. If not, re-cover and bring it back to a boil and continue cooking for three minutes. By this time all clams should be opened. Remove and discard any clams that remain closed.
Distribute stew in four large bowls, sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve with the baguette. Invite your guests to breath in the fragrance, rip off and dunk a piece of the baguette then “mangia!”- as an Italian would say!
Serves four.
‘What’s on the Board?’ by Neil Fox.
Dining and Cooking