Linguini with White Clam Sauce

I remember for a while when I was young, we had linguini with clam sauce fairly often. I don't know if the traditional dish had a surge of popularity in the 80s-90s or what. A Google search really didn't provide me with any information on that. Anyway, we ate this stuff a lot when I was a kid. And then it sort of disappeared. To be honest, I totally forgot that it ever existed. Then, a few weeks ago, Shawn and I went out to a seafood restaurant. As we stood up to leave, I saw that one of the people at a table near us was eating a big bowl full of pasta with clams. It looked so good! The memory of white clam sauce came flooding back to me, and I knew that I would be making it in the near future.

When I sat down to try to create my recipe, a funny thing happen. I thought, "But clam sauce comes from a can!" and I got a little confused. Those of you who know me, know that I would never eat sauce from a can, so this really made me laugh. Of course you can buy a canned version of the sauce, but why do that when it's so easy to make from the simplest ingredients?

Really, this sauce is super simple to make and requires little more than wine, garlic, onion, and parsley. I did use some canned baby clams in their juice but, looking back on it, fish stock would have worked just as well to thin out the sauce. This linguini and clam sauce doesn't take long to make at all, and the use of fresh ingredients results in a dish that tastes so much better (and so much less salty!!) than anything you can get from a can.