Regardless of its etymology, puttanesca’s allure lies in its complex, salty-sweet, umami flavours made from the humblest of ingredients – just tomato, garlic, chilli, anchovy, capers and olives
Not just any old rubbish: spaghetti all puttanesca. Photograph: Rachel Roddy for the Guardian
here are various stories about the origins of spaghetti alla puttanesca; various translations, too: whore’s spaghetti, tart’s spaghetti; I have even heard it called lady-of-the-night spaghetti.
As much as I like Neapolitan tales of seductively coloured clothes, satisfied customers and meals cooked between clients, the story that always comes into my mind is the hungry group rolling up to a trattoria late and demanding the owner “faccia una puttanata qualsiasi”. Now, in this context, puttanata translates as “a rubbish thing”, so you could translate this – clumsily maybe – as “make me whatever rubbish you have”. Now this is Naples and, as we all know, no one ever eats rubbish in Naples – especially in the stories recounted by English food writers in Rome. The puttanesca rumbled up in that kitchen was a thing of sapid beauty, a tangle of spaghetti with a deeply flavoured sauce of tomato, garlic, chilli and the inimitable three: anchovy, capers, olives. Such a thing of beauty that it became a much-requested dish known as puttanesca.
What makes it even more appealing is the notion that the very nature of puttanesca is anarchic; how else could it be when balancing such strong and divisive flavours as salty, briny, sweet and umami, when you are using what you have?
We have dealt with a recent move – across a courtyard and up a flight of stairs – by not being very balanced and ferrying rapidly cooling boxes of pizza across an uncharacteristically cold, and lately snowy, piazza. The great extent of my home cooking has been things rumbled out of the cupboard, at least one panful of which wasn’t nice at all (although I always have Laurie Colwin in mind with this sort of thing: “We learn by doing. If you never stuff a chicken with paté [or in my case put tinned peas and ancient, dusty oregano in your puttanesca] you will never know it is an unwise thing to do.”
For the the most part, though, when you put together pasta with tomato, garlic, chilli, anchovy, capers and olives, in proportions you like, the result is reliably tasty and satisfying.
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My start is pretty much always the same: while the pasta water comes to the boil, I warm six to eight tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a frying pan with two cloves of garlic – peeled and crushed for a gentle flavour; peeled and finely chopped for a more persistent one – making sure the garlic very gently sizzles rather than fries, and never burns (garlic is a bitter bully when it burns).
To this I add a couple of anchovy fillets and nudge them around the pan until they disintegrate, a pinch of red chilli flakes, and tomato – either a small tin or a few fresh ones peeled and chopped – then raise the heat a bit and let everything bubble in a lively way for about 10 minutes. Put the pasta in the water. At this point, the sauce is perfectly good and ready, or it can be enriched, depending on what you have or fancy: a pinch or fistful of rinsed capers or black olives, a tin of drained tuna or a handful of dried mushrooms that have been soaked back to life (not traditional).
Once tarted up, the sauce can bubble away until the pasta is ready to be drained and tossed with its partner. I pretty much always finish with a handful of finely chopped parsley. But, as is so often the case with this column, the above is simply a template, a springboard for you to make your own puttanata qualsiasi.
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