Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

The Neapolitan store-cupboard sauce of capers, olives, anchovy, chilli, and tomato, built in the time the pasta boils

Origin: Naples & Ischia, Campania, Italy

From the journey of Caper.

Nothing in this sauce is fresh, and that is the design rather than a shortcoming. The southern Italian larder was built for a climate and an economy in which very little kept, so it filled up with the things that did: salted anchovy, cured olive, salted caper, dried chilli, and preserved tomato. Put those five together with garlic and oil and you have puttanesca, a sauce that can be assembled entirely from a shelf in the twelve minutes a pan of spaghetti takes, with nothing bought that day and nothing chopped that needs a board. The capers and the anchovies are doing the heavy work, and they are doing it together. Between them they supply all the salt the dish needs, which is why the sauce is seasoned at the end and almost never at the beginning, and why the pasta water should be less salty than usual. The capers additionally bring their own sharp mustard-family bite, which is what keeps a sauce this concentrated from turning heavy. Anchovies alone give depth without edge; capers alone give edge without depth. The origins are argued over and the name more so. The usual account places it in Naples or on the island of Ischia around the middle of the twentieth century, with the most repeated story crediting the Ischian restaurateur Sandro Petti, and the various colourful explanations of the name are all unverifiable and mostly invented after the fact. What is certain is that the combination long predates the dish, since capers, olives, and anchovies had been going into southern Italian sauces for centuries before anyone attached that particular word to them. There is one live argument amongst cooks and it concerns the anchovies: Neapolitans generally melt them into the oil at the start so they disappear, while some cooks add them late for texture. Melting them is the older and better practice.

Ingredients

Pasta

  • 400 g spaghetti

Sauce

  • 75 ml extra-virgin olive oil
  • 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
  • 8 whole salted anchovy fillets in oil, drained
  • 1 tsp dried chilli flakes, or 1 whole dried peperoncino, crumbled
  • 4 tbsp salt-packed capers, soaked, rinsed, and drained
  • 120 g Gaeta or Kalamata olives, stoned and torn in half
  • 800 g tinned whole plum tomatoes, crushed by hand
  • 1 pinch dried oregano

To Finish

  • 4 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped

Method

  1. Put a large pan of water on to boil and salt it more lightly than you normally would, about half the usual amount.
  2. Warm the olive oil in a wide pan over a low heat with the sliced garlic. Cook gently for two to three minutes until the garlic is pale gold and fragrant, never brown.
  3. Add the anchovy fillets and the chilli flakes and stir with a wooden spoon for a minute or two, pressing the anchovies against the base of the pan until they dissolve completely into the oil.
  4. Add the capers and olives and cook for one minute, just long enough for them to warm through and take up some oil.
  5. Add the crushed tomatoes and the oregano. Simmer briskly, uncovered, for 12 to 15 minutes, until thickened and the oil separates and pools slightly at the edges.
  6. Meanwhile cook the spaghetti until one minute short of al dente. Reserve a mugful of the cooking water before draining.
  7. Tip the drained pasta into the sauce with a splash of the reserved water and toss hard over a high heat for a minute, until the sauce clings to the strands and no liquid pools in the pan.
  8. Take off the heat, stir through the parsley, taste for salt, and serve at once. No cheese.

Notes

Salt-packed capers, soaked twenty minutes and rinsed, are markedly better here than brined ones and are what Naples uses. Capers in vinegar will make the sauce taste of vinegar. Taste before adding any salt at the end. In most kitchens the answer is that it needs none. A puttanesca in bianco leaves out the tomato entirely and is excellent: double the capers and olives, add a splash of white wine and a handful of breadcrumbs toasted in oil. This is closer to what the sauce probably looked like before the tomato became universal in the south. The sauce keeps for three days refrigerated and improves overnight. It is also very good cold on bruschetta, and spooned over grilled or roast white fish, which is arguably its best use of all.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

Mapping Culinary History

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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