Clams, garlic, coriander, olive oil, lemon. Five ingredients and not one of them hidden behind technique. The Portuguese dish "ameijoas a Bulhao Pato" is proof that cooking is not built on complication, but on not ruining what is already good.

The name comes from Raimundo Antonio de Bulhao Pato, a nineteenth-century poet, essayist and gastronome who frequented Lisbon's literary circles and taverns and knew how to eat. A chef named the dish in his honour. So - a recipe named after a man known for knowing how to enjoy himself. It is hard to imagine a more honest dedication.

For four people you need one kilogram of fresh clams, two cloves of garlic, a bunch of fresh coriander, one lemon, eighty to a hundred millilitres of extra virgin olive oil, salt, freshly ground black pepper and rustic bread.

And here comes the step that decides everything, and that most people skip: the clams soak in a large bowl of cold salted water for an hour and a half to two hours, to purge the sand. The water gets changed once or twice. Skip it and you get a dish that crunches - and no later step can fix it.

Chop the garlic finely. Wash the coriander, dry it and chop it along with the tender stems, keeping a small amount aside for the end. Heat the oil in a wide pan over medium heat, the garlic goes in for one to two minutes - to golden and fragrant, not to brown. Burnt garlic means start again.

Then in go the drained clams and the coriander, a little salt and pepper; raise the heat slightly, cover, and cook until they open, giving the pan an occasional gentle shake. No sauce gets added - the clams release their own.

As soon as they open, take the pan off the heat and add the juice of half a lemon. Taste, adjust the salt, throw in the remaining fresh coriander. Serve immediately, very hot, in a wide dish or straight from the pan, with lemon cut into quarters and bread for mopping up the sauce.

Two hundred and fifty grams of clams per person and fifteen minutes of cooking. Here we know the same principle under another name and with other ingredients - the best thing in a kitchen is always that it is not afraid of a short ingredient list.