'Exciting' Puttanesca sauce recipe

puttanesca sauce recipe "exciting", well, there may be a good reason for it. The name pasta puttanesca actually mean's "prostitute's pasta".

The sauce is as exciting as its name suggests. A typical pasta puttanesca recipe would include a good mix of intense-flavoured ingredients such as anchovies, capers, chilli, garlic and black olives.

Puttanesca is a rough, rustic and salty sauce that lives up to its famous name.

One unusual feature of puttanesca sauce is that it might be considered both oil-based as well as tomato-sauce based. For while the base sauce is tomatoes, it also contains generous amounts of olive oil.

And if you leave out the anchovy, the puttanesca sauce recipe becomes vegetarian. Hmmm...

But click here for an anchovy pasta recipe that is very similar to this puttanesca sauce recipe.

Young history

Although often classified as a classic Italian dish, pasta puttanesca has a relatively young history that dates back to, at the earliest, the 1950s or 1960s. But unlike other recent pasta sauces like Alfredo and Carbonara, this is one pasta dish that, despite its name, did not get popularised and "bastardized" in the United States.

No one is sure about where the original pasta puttanesca recipe came from.

One story says it was created in the 1950s by Sandro Petti, co-owner of a famous restaurant and nightspot on the Italian island of Ischia. Near closing time one evening, Petti found a group of hungry friends at one of his tables. He was low on ingredients and they told him: "Facci una puttanata qualsiasi" or “make any kind of garbage.”

So he made a pasta dish using whatever he had and when he later served the dish at his restaurant, he changed the word puttanata, meaning "garbage", to puttanesca, meaning "prostitute'. And so the first pasta puttanesca sauce recipe was created.

Another theory is that Puttenesca was a quick, cheap meal that prostitutes could prepare between customers. Whatever its origins, enjoy this prostitute's pasta or...

Pasta puttanesca sauce recipe

Ingredients (serves 4 to 6):

• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 red chilli, chopped
• 4 anchovy fillets, rinsed and dried
• 1 tbsp salted capers, rinsed and dried
• 1/2 cup stoned black olives
• 1 can (approx 240 grams) tomatoes
• 1/2 tsp dried oregano
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• ground black pepper, generous amounts
  
  
• 300 grams spaghetti or other pasta, cooked according to instructions.

Method:

1. In a heavy pan, heat half the olive oil.
2. Add garlic, chilli and anchovies and cook over medium heat until the anchovy dissolves.
3. Add tomatoes, olives, oregano, salt and pepper. Stir well and simmer for 15 minutes or longer.
4. Serve drizzled with additional olive oil.

Notes:

Feel free to vary the amounts of the various ingredients, depending on whether you prefer a stronger or lighter tasting pasta puttanesca sauce recipe.
If you wish, add 1/2 cup of dry white wine - and either simmer longer or reduce the amount of tomatoes so that the sauce won't be so watery.