Fusilli Porcini Puttanesca Fusilli with Porcini Puttanesca Sauce Recipe

• 60 minutes to make
• Serves 4

Pasta Puttanesca (Italian Pasta alla Puttanesca) is an Italian pasta dish made with a sauce named sugo alla puttanesca. Puttanesca is an urban and a modern sauce, not dependent upon seasonal ingredients and reflecting the bounty of the market shop rather than the bounty of the garden. Read more The sauce is not part of traditional Italian cuisine: the earliest reference to pasta “alla puttanesca” in print cited by the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana is Raffaele La Capria’s 1961 novel Ferito a morte, 1961, and the professional association of pastamakers, Unione Industriali Pastai Italiani, agrees that the sauce became popular in the 1960s. The name originated in Naples after the local prostitutes, Pasta alla Puttanesca meaning "Pasta the way a whore would make it". The reason why the dish gained such a name is debated, though the most obvious contrast— with alla casalinga, simple "home-style" tomato sauce which has been "tarted up", as the English would say— is ignored for livelier original legends. One possibility is that the name is a reference to the sauce's hot, spicy flavour and pungent smell. Another is that the dish was offered to prospective customers at a low price to entice them into a brothel[citation needed]. According to chef Jeff Smith of the Frugal Gourmet, its name came from the fact that it was a quick, cheap meal that prostitutes could prepare between customers. A more thorough story about this dish comes from Diane Seed in her book, Top 100 Pasta Sauces .She says: “ My introduction to this famous pasta dish occurred when I overheard two elderly priests discussing the pros and cons of Spaghetti alla Puttanesca ("Whore's spaghetti") as they deliberated over the menu in a Neapolitan restaurant. Made of ingredients found in most Italian larders, this is also known as 'Spaghetti alla Buona Donna' - or 'Good Woman's Spaghetti' - which can be misleading if one is not familiar with the ironic insult 'figlio d'una buona donna' - son of a good woman. To understand how this sauce came to get its name, one must consider the 1950s when brothels in Italy were state-owned. They were known as case chiuse or 'closed houses' because the shutters had to be kept permanently closed to avoid offending the sensibilities of neighbors or innocent passers-by. Conscientious Italian housewives usually shop at the local market every day to buy fresh food, but the 'civil servants' were only allowed one day per week for shopping, and their time was valuable. Their specialty became a sauce made quickly from odds and ends in the larder. ” See less

• tomatoes
• onion
• garlic
• capers
• anchovies
• olives
• tomato
• onions
• stovetop
• italian