PUTTANESCA
Spaghetti alla puttanesca, pasta with a spicy tomato, olive and caper sauce (with or without anchovies), is a mid-20th century addition to Italian cuisine, though the origins of both the dish and its name are disputed. But more on that later.
At Lemon Heaven – our café in Brixham – we made Puttanesca without anchovies as our popular vegan counterpart to Bolognese. It also proved popular with my daughter, particularly after we discovered the dish featured in the first volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events. In both the movie and the brilliant Netflix adaptation there is some discussion as to what puttanesca may mean in Italian. Understandably - as you will read below - an actual definition is not offered.
Lemon Heaven Puttanesca
This serves 2-4, depending on how much sauce is used per person. It is quick and easy to prepare. If you are in a hurry, it can be prepared in its entirety while your pasta cooks.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 red pepper cut into strips
2 red chillies, sliced
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
Half a regular-sized jar of pitted black olives, halved or sliced
2 tablespoons of capers
Small bunch of fresh basil – remove as many of the stems as you can, and rip the leaves by hand – keep some to serve
2 teaspoons of paprika
Black pepper
Salt
How To Do it
Heat the olive oil in a medium-sized pan
Add onions, red pepper and several twists of black pepper, then saute for 2 minutes, stirring with a spatula
Add the garlic and saute for a further 5 minutes until the peppers have started to soften
Add the tomatoes, olives and capers and paprika
Simmer for at least 5 minutes – or up to 15 minutes, if you’re not in a hurry, to reduce the sauce
Half way through simmering, stir in the fresh basil
Check the seasoning –olives and capers are salty, so only a little salt should be needed
Serving Suggestions
Serve on a bed of spaghetti or pasta of your choice, topped with cheese and fresh basil. As a nod to the anchovies used in some Italian varieties of puttanesca, a few anchovy fillets may also be used to decorate the portions of people who like them.
PUTTANESCA NEAPOLITANA
The original recipe from Naples
Ingredients
2 tablespoons of olive oil
5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 tin of chopped tomatoes, or the equivalent in fresh tomatoes, skinned and chopped
Half a regular-sized jar of pitted black olives, halved or sliced
2 tablespoons of capers
1 teaspoon of oregano (dried or fresh)
Black pepper
Salt (if needed)
a few sprigs of flat-leaf parsley, chopped – remove as many of the stems as you can
How to do it
Heat the olive oil and saute the garlic, mixing with a spatula until it starts to brown
Add the tomatoes, olives, capers, oregano and black pepper
Simmer for around 10 minutes
Check the seasoning before serving.
Serving
Mix the sauce into al dente pasta, then serve in a bowl with a sprinkling of parsley
PUTTANESCA LAZIALE
The variation from Lazio
This is made in the same way, except:
saute half a small tin of anchovies, chopped, along with the garlic
use green olives instead of black
use extra flat-leaf parsley instead of oregano
extra salt is unlikely to be needed owing to the saltiness of the anchovies, olives and capers
Culinary trivia: Pitted black olives are actually green olives dyed black. Check the ingredients and you will see they contain an iron compound for this purpose. The reason being that real black olives are too soft for the stones to be removed mechanically.
ORIGINS AND ETYMOLOGY
There are two main variants of sugo alla puttanesca (Puttanesca sauce) – as made in Lazio (with anchovies) and as made in Naples (without anchovies) - which became popular in the 1960s. Prior to this, Italian cookbooks going back to the mid-19th century have recipes for similar sauces but under different, more literal names.
The popular belief is that spaghetti alla puttanesca translates literally into English as “prostitute’s spaghetti”, or more colloquially as whore’s or tart’s spaghetti, and is so called because either:
it is quick and easy to make
prostitutes (for that reason) found it a convenient dish to prepare between customers
it was prepared by a Neapolitan brothel owner to entice customers
mid-century Italian prostitutes smelt of anchovies and garlic,
it is “hot strong and gutsy”, or
it can be made quickly by anyone between other obligations
This may be an urban myth, originating because the name is similar to puttana, meaning whore, though my Italian is not good enough to refute it with any authority. Prostitution was not exactly frowned upon amidst the high unemployment of post-war Italy, and was almost glorified by, for example, Sophia Loren’s portrayal of prostitutes in several movies. However, none of this explains where the name puttanesca came from in the first place.
One plausible explanation is that – in the 1950s- a group of customers visiting a restaurant on the island of Ischia, on being told it was too close to closing time and the kitchen was short of ingredients, demanded of the chef to facci una puttanata qualsiasi. The most literal English rendition I can find is “make us any worthless thing” though “make us any old crap” sounds more authentic. The word puttanata, something worthless, is derived from the Italian word for whore, puttana, which helps to explain the confusion. The chef in question only had a few tomatoes, olives and capers left, and the rest is history.