Recipe
Pasta alla puttanesca with tuna
Nobody agrees on why puttanesca is called puttanesca, and the disagreement is considerably more entertaining than the truth probably is.
The story everyone repeats is the obvious one. Puttana means whore, and the tale goes that the women of the Spanish Quarter in Naples cooked this between clients because it was fast, or alternatively that they cooked it to draw men in off the street with the smell, which is a theory that reveals more about the people repeating it than about anything else.
The competing version is duller and therefore more likely to be true. It comes from a restaurateur on Ischia in the 1950s who was asked to feed some friends after closing time and had almost nothing left in the kitchen. He is supposed to have been told facitemi una puttanata qualsiasi, make me any old rubbish, using a word that means junk rather than anything anatomical. That version has a named source and a date attached, which in Italian food history counts as an unusually strong case.
Either way it is a cupboard dish, and that is the entire point of it. Olives, capers, anchovies, garlic, chilli, a tin of tomatoes. Nothing in it goes off. Nothing in it needs planning or a trip. It is the dish for the evening when the fridge contains one lemon and a jar of mustard.
Tuna is not traditional and adding it will annoy somebody on the internet. It is here because a puttanesca on its own is a very good sauce with no protein in it, and a tin of tuna in olive oil turns it into a meal you are not hungry after at 22:00.
The anchovies are not optional and they do not taste of fish. They melt into the oil in about ninety seconds and vanish, leaving a savoury depth nothing else in a cupboard can provide.
- Prep 10 min
- Cook 20 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Put a large pot of well-salted water on. Warm the olive oil in a wide pan over low heat with the garlic and chilli until the garlic is pale gold and smells sweet, not bitter.
4 min
- 2
Add the anchovies and press them with a wooden spoon. They will fall apart and disappear into the oil in about a minute. This is the whole foundation of the sauce.
2 min
- 3
Add the olives and capers, stir for a minute, then tip in the tomatoes. Season carefully: the olives, capers and anchovies have already brought a great deal of salt.
2 min
- 4
Simmer briskly until the sauce has thickened and darkened and no longer tastes of raw tin.
12 min
- 5
Cook the pasta, keeping a mugful of the water. Flake the tuna into the sauce with its oil and warm it through for a minute, without stirring it to a paste.
10 min
- 6
Add the drained pasta and a splash of the water and toss hard until glossy. Parsley at the end.
2 min
Variations
Leave out the tuna for the classic version and serve it as a first course. Fresh cherry tomatoes instead of tinned in summer, halved, cooked down for 8 minutes. A spoon of tomato purée deepens a weak tin. Add a handful of rocket at the end for pepperiness. For a white puttanesca, skip the tomatoes entirely and use more oil, more parsley and a squeeze of lemon.