Rachel Roddy’s classic Neapolitan puttanesca sauce recipe

There 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.


Source :- theguardian

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