fregula fish chowder
a one-pot meal inspired by sand castles and sardinia
Seafood just tastes better in summer. Yes, it’s peak season for many of our favorite underwater delicacies, and yes, their sweet, oceanic flavor is precisely what we want to be eating under the blistering sun. But for me, summertime seafood also calls to particular memories, memories of my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins huddled around platters of shrimp and clams and fresh fish on the beaches of West Hampton. As I get older, I feel like my mind is constantly scrambling for purchase on the world around me (I can hardly remember what I did last week), but there are some things—glimpses of faces and places and feelings, like spots of sunshine dappled through the shade—that will never fade. Fighting over the last piece of shrimp with my toes in the sand and my grandmother tanning on a nearby beach chair is one of them.
I might not eat shellfish anymore, but I’ll happily devour pretty much any fin fish, and particularly the flaky filets like halibut and seabass that are tender enough to melt in your mouth but firm enough to actually absorb flavor. So today I’m sharing one of my favorite ways to eat them, gently poached in a bright tomato broth and paired with fregula: small toasted balls of semolina also known as Italian or Sardinian couscous.
Fregula (or fregola, from the modern word for “crumbs”) isn’t just old, it’s ancient. It emerged in Sardinia over a thousand years ago, possibly brought to the island by the Phoenicians, though proud Sardinians are quick to claim that no such evidence exists. It wasn’t until the 14th century that the pasta was officially acknowledged, in a statute that regulated commercial pasta production in the town of Tempio Pausania in northern Sardinia. Today, most fregula is factory-produced and sold dried, but it was originally made by hand by mixing coarsely ground durum wheat (semolina) and slightly salted water in a terracotta or wooden bowl called a scivedda. The technique is similar to the North African way of making couscous: The water is added to the flour gradually, fingers mixing all the while, until small balls of dough start to form. These are then dried and toasted in the oven to give the pasta its signature golden color and nutty flavor.
You’ll find fregula prepared in a variety of ways, but one of its most popular applications is, as one might expect for an island, with seafood. It’s a dish called fregula con le arselle, or fregola con vongole, in which local clams and the pasta are cooked in a broth spiked with tomatoes and garlic. I wrote this recipe before coming across this particular dish, but I’m not surprised by the similarities between the two—seafood cooked in a light, tomato-infused liquid, with or without pasta, is widespread for good reason. My recipe, of course, is rather different, not only because I’ve swapped the clams for fish, but also because I bolstered the broth with another of Sardinia’s favorite Phoenician-era ingredients: saffron.
I’ve talked quite a bit about how important saffron, known affectionately as “red gold,” is to Sardinian cooking, and to pasta-making in particular. Most notably, it was common among generations of Sardinian pasta makers to infuse their water-based doughs with saffron in order to turn them gold—an attempt to mimic the color of eggs, which for a long time were more expensive than the now-coveted red threads (ah, how times have changed). I won’t get into this too much today, but all of this is to say that I’m hard-pressed to take inspiration from Sardinian cooking without adding a pinch of saffron, and here it both intensifies the broth’s ruby hue and imparts a delicate honeyed flavor. Needless to say, this is exactly the kind of beachy fare that brings back those beloved childhood memories in the sand, so much so that if I close my eyes, I can pretend my whole family is there to enjoy it right along with me.
Fregula Fish Chowder
Serves 4