Pasta 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.

The name may have originated in Naples after the local prostitutes – Pasta Puttanesca meaning “Pasta in the way a prostitute would make it”.  The reason why the dish gained such a name is debated.  One possibility is that the name is a reference to the sauce’s hot, spicy flavour and pungent smell.

The ingredients for sugo alla puttanesca tend to be very easy to find, and are typically Mediterranean. Extra-virgin olive oil (instead of butter, more commonly used in northern Italian cooking) is put in a frying pan. Then, finely chopped cloves of garlic (sometimes with onions) are added, followed by peperoncino (dried hot peppers) and anchovy fillets mashed with a fork. Anchovies are usually not sautéed for a long time, to avoid a strong “fishy” taste. Ingredients such as tuna and mushroom are sometimes added for variety to the soffritto in some recipes, while others strictly exclude both. Tomatoes are poured in, and when the sauce comes to the boiling point, chopped salted capers and stoned black olives are added.  The sauce will be reduced over heat. As a final touch, chopped parsley and fresh basil leaves are occasionally included.

Recipes may differ according to preferences; sugo alla puttanesca must be a little salty (from salted anchovies and olives), spicy (from hot red peppers) and quite fragrant (with large amounts of garlic). Traditionally, the sauce is served with spaghetti spaghetti alla puttanesca, although it may also be used with other dry pasta types like bucatini, linguine and vermicelli.

Like many Italian foods, pasta puttanesca has gained some modern popularity as it has been featured on various cooking instruction programs on television.

Many people believe that the best pasta alla putanesca in the world come from the small village of Valle San Giovanni, a frazione (suburb) of the provincial capital of Teramo in Italy’s rugged Abruzzo Region. The dish in this locale is made in the traditional Teramo manner.  These pasta’s in this area sometimes contain peas (piselli) and tiny meatballs (polpettini).  Valle San Giovanni is also well known as the home of Casale, a guest villa built in the year 2004.