This is Peluso's recipe for Puttanesca Sauce, which he warns
is messy to make, but worth it for the taste. He said the
smaller the amount you make at one time, the better it tastes:
Puttanesca Sauce
Serves 6
1/4 pound oil-cured olives
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 of a 2-ounce can of anchovies (about 4 fish
1 tablespoon plus 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
1 tablespoon capers
1/2 cup Romano cheese
1 teaspoon hot pepper flakes, or to taste
2 cans (24 ounces each) San Marzano tomatoes
thick pasta such as rigatoni, about 1/4 pound per person
Warm 1 tablespoon oil in a skillet. Add garlic, olives and
anchovies. ''Burn the garlic,'' Peluso said, cooking until
it starts to turn black and the olives harden.
Add 1/2 cup oil gradually, stirring it into the other
ingredients. Crush the tomatoes with your hand and add
to sauce. Cook for five minutes.
Mix with cooked pasta and sprinkle cheese on top.
5 years ago
4 comments:
"puttanesca" roughly translates to "whore style"...
read this awhile back...
apparently, the italian prostitutes would make puttanesca pasta between clients because the sauce could be made quickly, not like nonna's sauce (or gravy...as some folks call it) that took all day sunday to prepare.
Thank You Brando:)
I saw how this word began and noted
its similarity to the Italian word
for whore but did not know Italian
good enough to dismiss the possibility that that was just how it looked but meant something else.
LOL
Mack and Brando, this sauce is fairly recent - not a real Italian classic.
When serving in the Navy back in the mid to late 60s, I tasted similar sauces in Naples and in Palermo that had olives, capers, anchovies. In Palermo the similar sauce was spiced up with hot pepper.
Food in Italy was major league different from anything I had in the Burg.
Some quick research shows that Sandro Petti of Rancio Fellone, on Isola d'Ischia (in the Bay of Naples near Isola d'Capri)) claims to have made this sauce for late evening customers after he ran out of most of his usual ingredients.
I love the stuff! I have most of the ingredients, but sorry, Angelo, I'm gonna use more garlic tomorrow!
Here's the word from Wikipedia on the origin.
"Various accounts are given of the sauce’s origins, but it is likely that they date to the mid twentieth century. The earliest printed reference to this dish, as identified by the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, is Raffaele La Capria’s 1961 novel Ferito a morte which refers to spaghetti alla puttanesca come li fanno a Siracusa (‘spaghetti alla puttanesca as they make it in Syracuse’). According to the Professional Union of Italian Pasta Makers the sauce became popular in the 1960s.
As to place, both Sicily and the Bay of Naples have been suggested. The 1971 edition of the Cucchiaio d’argento has no recipe with this name, but two which are similar.
The Neapolitan Spaghetti alla partenopea, in which the anchovies are added towards the end of cooking, is flavoured with generous quantities of oregano, while spaghetti alla siciliana is distinguished by the addition of peppers to the ingredients.
Sandro Petti's claim:
According to Annarita Cuomo, writer for Il Golfo, a newspaper serving the Italian islands of Ischia and Procida, sugo alla puttanesca was invented in the 1950s by Sandro Petti, co-owner of Rancio Fellone, a famous Ischian restaurant and nightspot.
The moment of inspiration came, writes Cuomo, when near closing one evening, Petti found a group of hungry friends sitting at one of his tables. Petti was low on ingredients and told them he didn't have enough to make them a meal. They complained that it was late and they were hungry. "Facci una puttanata qualsiasi" or “make any kind of garbage,” they insisted. (In this usage, puttanata is a noun meaning garbage or something worthless even though it derives from the Italian word for whore, puttana.)
At the time, Petti had nothing more than four tomatoes, two olives and some capers; the basic ingredients for the sugo. “So I used them to make the sauce for the spaghetti,” Petti told Cuomo.
Later, Petti included this dish on his menu as spaghetti alla puttanesca."
I was near the start of food history!
Good recipe but a bit salty. Next time I will eliminate either the dried olives or capers.
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