Food 24: the best puttanesca

for when you're famished and in a hurry 🍝

I’ve had one of those weeks where it’s Monday one second and then suddenly wham, it’s Sunday morning again. I don’t know what happened. And it’s not only Sunday but the sodding 20th of October, which is practically November, which means we’ve entered that speeded-up bit. Cue this year’s first outing of the Roz Chast cartoon that I never tire of:

Image: The New Yorker/Conde Nast

All this racing about - doing what, though? I still can’t properly explain where the time went - means that I have not planned the contents of today’s post. Also I have woken up with a monstrous cold. So I am just going to give you my spaghetti alla puttanesca recipe, because everyone who’s ever had it has asked for it. Please forgive the charmless bragging, but I make the best puttanesca I’ve eaten in my life.

This is not a claim I make lightly, and I certainly don’t make it about anything else I cook, HEAVEN FORBID. But I make it here because I find other puttanescas boringly timid and underpowered. The dish is supposed to be spirited and punchy. It’s not supposed to be polite. It’s the sort of thing you eat with kitchen roll to hand, not napkins. It’s very good if a group of you come back hungry from somewhere; it’s excellent at a normal time of day if there’s nothing in the fridge; and it’s the perfect thing to eat in bed at 2am in the early (or late!) stages of a relationship.

(It’s not at all a Roman dish, but if you were in Rome and spoke the dialect, you’d say ‘Se famo du’ spaghi?’ and make a quick twisting motion with your index and middle fingers. I learned this in another lifetime - it means let’s quickly eat something, spaghetti or otherwise - and it pops into my head in a food emergency, for which this recipe is ideal).

The point is, it’s an adult dish, full-bodied and ripe. It’s not an ingėnue. It should taste a bit unruly, and mine does. The other thing I love about it is that it tastes of summer even in the depths of winter, but not in a jarringly weird way, so unlike e.g. anything that requires fresh basil in January.

The story

llustration by Paul Bommer. More recent version of it on sale here.

'Puttana’ or ‘puta’ is a derogatory word for women who have sex for money, though like the French ‘putain’ or ‘pute’, it is now an all-purpose swear word. The story is that sex workers in the bordellos of Naples - I think we’re in about the 1950s - rustled up a quick bowl of this spaghetti when they got hungry between clients. I’ve no idea how true this is. It seems entirely plausible: surely you’d be starving, plus the ingredients would have been cheap, abundant and super-local. But I also wonder if it’s a male invention: the ‘bad’ girl who is nevertheless ‘good’ enough to make a nice bowl of pasta seems a conscience-easing way of approaching the whole Madonna/whore thing.

Anyway: whatever its origins, puttanesca, or ‘in the whore style’ (😒), is unbelievably delicious and you can - and in fact must - make it entirely from store cupboard ingredients. It takes as long to make as it takes your biggest pan of water to boil and the spaghetti to cook, which for me totals roughly 15 minutes from filling the pan from the cold tap to sitting down to eat. Maybe a couple of minutes more. Use the best anchovies you can afford. I wouldn't make this with not-spaghetti. It would be fine, but shapes exist for a reason.

Barsotti was such a genius. This one makes me well up. Fact remains: no fun shapes with puttanesca

Anchovy hatred

They mean you no harm. I wish we got that dinky little spear in the UK

I should just say that one of my children, who claims to ‘hate’ anchovies, invariably has thirds of this. (The one who claims to ‘hate’ cauliflower devours this creamy, cheese-laden simplified gratin, which is a gift link and is so good. Note that the initial cooking of the cauliflower takes much longer than the recipe states, more like 30 minutes).

What this proves is that a melted, good quality anchovy in a sauce is not at all the same thing as an excessively assertive, inferior anchovy sitting on a Domino’s pizza. It is intensely savoury and umami. What it is not is fishy, even in these quantities. You know how anchovy adds a depth of flavour to beef stew, where it is completely undetectable as anchovy (here’s the classic Nigella recipe from How To Eat)? Or how if you slash a leg of lamb and stuff the slits with garlic, anchovy and rosemary it tastes amazing but again not explicitly of anchovy? (Nifty tricks from one of Tom Parker Bowles’ books: use tiny scrapings of Gentleman’s Relish, it’s less fiddly and these days also cheaper).

Or how in Victorian England beef pies often had oysters in them, without tasting oystery? Or how fish sauce, which comes out of the bottle as something shockingly brash, softens into something wonderful through cooking?

Same principle, different outcome: you can absolutely taste the anchovy here, but it doesn’t taste of what anchovy-haters think anchovy tastes like, which is pungent, ultra-fishy and borderline fetid. Here it tastes mellow and rounded. I promise. It’s like the difference between cashmere and really itchy rough wool.

Spaghetti alla puttanesca

This is for 4 people with normal appetites.

1. Fill an enormous pan with water. The bigger the better - like all of us, pasta needs room to express itself in. Add some salt, but not as much as you’d usually use because anchovies are salty. Put that pan on a high heat.

2. Put a shallow, wide pan - any kind of deep frying pan, skillet or shallow round casserole - on a medium heat on another burner. Add a glug of olive oil.

   

   The most useful pan shape known to humankind. Left, Le Creuset, middle, IKEA, right, Our Place

3. Slice two fat cloves of garlic.

4. When the shallow pan is hot, add the garlic and stir. Give it 30 seconds and then tip in 1 whole can or glass jar of anchovy fillets in olive oil - the whole contents, including its oil. Stir so it’s not sitting there in a clump.

5. Add a pinch or two of chilli flakes. I don’t know how hot your particular chilli flakes are, but you do. Add enough for the heat to make itself felt.

6. The anchovies will quickly start dissolving. The garlic and chilli will sizzle. Give it all a stir again.

7. Once the anchovies have dissolved (moments), add a 400g can of best-quality chopped tomatoes, or whole tinned tomatoes that you crush through your fingers as you put them in, and stir that in. Then get the empty tomato tin, 3/4 fill it with water, and add that in too.

8. When the pasta water starts boiling, add in 500g of spaghetti, bending it round with a wooden spoon so no bits stick out.

9. To the shallow pan, add a generous tablespoon (or two - I love capers) of capers and as many pitted black olives (halved if you want) as you like, drained if they’re in brine.

10. The sauce will look watery but will quickly thicken. If it starts looking too thick before the pasta is done, take it off the heat.

11. When the pasta is cooked, fish it out with tongs and swirl it straight into the pan with the sauce. The water clinging to the strands is the sauce’s friend, so don’t worry about it. Toss very well (the olives will try and migrate to the bottom).

12. Dish up and eat, with Parmesan to grate on the side.

If the pasta is ready before the sauce, just drain it and leave it sitting in the colander for a couple of minutes while the sauce thickens (turn it up if needs be to hurry it along) before adding it back in.

Thank you for reading! These fortnightly food posts are free for everyone. They alternate with shorter picture posts, which are also free. Everything else is for paid subscribers, so do consider that if you’d like to. Here is a free sampler. Either way, have a wonderful Sunday, and if you liked this post then do please really kindly hit the ❤️ button - it makes it more visible. Thank you!