Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

Travelling back from Puglia I passed Neaples again and stopped for having a short lunch and a good plate of typical pasta alla puttanesca.

The "puttanesca" is one of the most known and appreciated Italian sauces for seasoning pasta. The name seems to have been coined in Ischia around the 1950s, when the green island, still suspended between tradition and worldliness, lived its most beautiful period.

Jeanne Carole Francesconi in "La Cucina Napoletana", the cornerstone of Neapolitan gastronomic literature, explains how the name of this sauce was changed by the painter Eduardo Colucci, a Neapolitan by birth but adopted by Ischia, from "alla marinara" to "alla puttanesca". Eduardo, exponent of the Neapolitan pictorial school, together with his brother Vincenzo settled in Ischia at the end of the 40s of the last century, and, in the splendid setting of Villa Rosica in Ischia in Punta Molino, formed a cenacle that welcomed artists, writers and movie stars.

Luchino Visconti stayed for long periods, preparing here some theatrical and cinematographic works. Frequent frequenters of the villa were the writer Jean Anouilh, the actors Anna Magnani, Vittorio Gassman, Eduardo De Filippo and Jean Marais, the painter Carlo Carrà. Colucci, as Francesconi remembers, lived for friends and in the summer lived in a rustic and tiny building, located in one of the most suggestive corners of the island; the house consisted of a room with kitchenette, bathroom and a terrace in the middle of which stood an olive tree.

The splendid terrace overlooking the sea was the scene of memorable evenings. Colucci, after offering a fresh and genuine Ischia wine as an aperitif, improvised a dinner of vermicelli alla puttanesca, which had become his specialty.

Whoever claims the paternity of the name is Colucci's nephew, Sandro Petti, architect and Pygmalion of Ischia's "dolce vita" of the 1950s. In his "Rangio Fellone" have performed artists of the caliber of Mina (at the time Baby Gate), Peppino di Capri, Lucio Battisti and other famous names. Collecting the testimony of Petti is Anna Maria Chiariello, Neapolitan journalist and appreciated television face, who in her beautiful book "Lucio Battisti - Emozioni Ischitane" brings to life the emotions, precisely, of a magical moment for the island.

However, whether it was the painter Colucci or his nephew Sandro Petti to call "alla puttanesca" spaghetti with tomatoes, olives and capers, it is certain that the name was given to Ischia and, from there, spread throughout the world.

I quote the excerpt from the Chiarello book: "One evening around four in the morning, we were at the Rangio and there were some really hungry friends - Petti says - I had finished everything so I warned them. "I'm sorry, I told them, I don't have anything in the kitchen anymore, I can't prepare you anything." But they insisted saying "Come on Sandro, it's late and we are hungry, where you want us to go, let us have any whore". So the architect who also had a passion for cooking as well as for the arts, after a while brought a steaming bowl of pasta to the ... whore. And that is spaghetti, garlic, oil, pummarolelle, olives, capers, full of parsley. A success. The tureen returned to the kitchen clean. "I still keep it, I keep it in my Roman villa, says Petti, it is so big that with five kilos of spaghetti it covers the bottom". The recipe ended up on the menu, "I called it puttanesca, it wasn't pretty crap" but it earned him a nice reprimand from Bishop Ernesto De Laurentis because of that somewhat vulgar term. (...) "It was me and not my uncle who prepared for the first time the sauce I later called alla puttanesca".

And against all cooked sauces “alla puttanesca” I’d like to show you the fastest and easiest not cooked puttanesca sauce. (see recipes)