Prostitution has different connotations around the world, but there's only one place where it's inspired a sauce. That place is Italy and the stuff is puttanesca, which translates roughly to "lady of the night. It's made by combining anchovies, capers, olives, and optional ingredients like garlic, red pepper flakes, chile peppers, and tomatoes into a truly tasty gravy.
To find out how this strangely named dish came to be, we hunted down a pair of Italian historians. Next time you have a dinner party, serve your sauce with a story! Most Italian sauces date back to the s, but puttanesca is relatively new school according to food historian and Italian cookbook author Francine Segan.
She places the creation sometime in the last 60 or 70 years, timed with a particularly turbulent time in Italian history: World War II. These days young women have plenty of career options, but during wartime in Italy there weren't nearly as many internships available. Women resorted to "working the night shift. Some corners of the Internet will tell you that puttanesca earned its name because prostitutes could easily cook it up between clients, which sounds wholesome, disgusting, and very bogus.
If speed was the goal, a hot sauce probably wasn't the move. Her anecdote doesn't exactly qualify as a definitive background story, but it isn't too far-fetched to say that the powerful mix of anchovies, olives, and capers might have something in common with the scent of a mid-century Italian prostitute.
Tebben didn't have much to offer in terms of suggestive origin anecdotes, but she did have a simple recipe for us. Segan added that tomatoes, garlic, and chile peppers can make an appearance, but that a truly down-and-out prostitute would add a sea rock from the coastline instead of anchovies. This would offer a similarly briny flavor to a pot of boiling water. Taking their suggestions except for the stone part , here is our resident chef Perry's recipe!
