Emma 
Di Mambro delicatessen is a family-run deli located on Quarry Street, Hamilton, less than 5 mins walk from Hamilton Central railway station.
Compact in size there is a bar and a couple of stools for sitting inside & there are chairs outside on a good day, so it’s more a takeaway than sit-in deli.
They stock the usual snacks & sandwich fillings but have the added bonus of a pasta bar with home-made pasta sauce, Italian sausage, meatballs and a shelf of cannoli (including flavours such as pistachio) and other Italian pastries (like these Sfogliatelle-type treats opposite).
The ready-to-microwave pasta bar portions are, as you would expect, Italian! You certainly won’t be hungry here! But we were most intrigued by the unusually-shaped (and mostly tiny) dried pasta selection & the home-made Di Mambro’s pasta sauce which is now available in Roots, Fruits & Flowers at Kelvinbridge on Great Western Road.
For our dinner we took a pancetta pasta sauce, some meatballs, Italian sausage and Molisana Orecchiette Pugliesi pasta (disc shaped pasta that we’d never tried before). They also sell chicken Milanese, which we understand they are having a hard time trying to sell to local school children in place of Pot Noodles!
Made the usual way, our dinner was so simple that a student could have made it! But this wasn’t made with a bland pasta sauce that had been sitting on a supermarket shelf for months but rather a fresh & delicious sauce with chunks of real pancetta and the disc pasta was a bit different.
The meatballs were really tasty, meaty and not fatty at all. The Italian sausage was fatty but it was flavoursome fat – so again very tasty and meaty.
They also stock Italian wine & liqueur, huge panettone and other Italian goodies. We found a Christmas present for someone in the shop too!
We also lifted a piccante sauce for Father Foodie, a former chef and he was pleased with the results – he made linguine topped with prawns that had been marinaded in lime juice, mace (a historic nod to potted shrimps) and garlic, parsley & olive oil, fried in butter and spooned over the pasta & sauce. Recipe below.
Address:
Di Mambros Deli
176 Quarry Street
Hamilton, Lanarkshire ML3 6QR
Telephone:
01698 282302
www.dimambros.co.uk
Piccante Prawn Pasta
Father Foodie (in the manner of Nigel Slater): To my mind, pasta and prawns are a perfect pairing. My usual approach to is to use a plain tomato sauce with pasta as a base, then top it with chilli and garlic prawns. But on this occasion I decided to let Di Mambro’s sauce provide a spicy base for the prawns. The result was very tasty… and Di Mambro’s picante sauce has quite a kick.
If you are using plain tomato sauce add a chopped chilli, or 1/2 teaspoon of Kashmiri chilli, powder to the marinade.
The mace is not a vital ingredient but rather a gentle nod to the flavour of potted shrimps.
Ingredients (for 2 people):
1 tub of De Mambros picante pasta sauce
120 grams of linguini
1 pack raw king prawns (about a dozen)
1/4 teaspoon mace
1-2 crushed cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of lime juice
2 teaspoons olive oil
Knob of butter
Tablespoon of chopped parsley
Method:
Mix the prawns, mace, garlic, lime juice, olive oil and parsley in a bowl and leave to marinade while you cook the pasta.
Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions. When it is just cooked. Drain and return to the pot. Add enough De Mambros picante sauce to coat the pasta well. Put the lid on the pan and leave aside on a gentle heat.
Melt the butter in a separate pan. Add the prawn mixture and cook on a high heat till the prawns are pink. That will only take a couple of minutes.
To serve
Put the pasta mixture into bowls and top with prawns.
I love to sleep and cuddle cats too. Thanks for the info on where to source orecchiette, I tried it for the first time on Saturday in the Angels’ with Bagpipes restaurant in Edinburgh, it was delicious.