The Risqué Story You Never Knew Behind Puttanesca Sauce

From brothels to beloved pasta, how one scandalous sauce simmered its way into Italian-American folklore.

Puttanesca Is Less Sweet, More Scandal

Some Italian recipes whisper their history through generations of nonnas and oil-stained recipe pages, handwritten in a sweet version of Itanglish. Others shout it through the open windows of Napoletana brothels. Puttanesca is less sweet, more scandal, or so the story goes. While it’s more likely that this dish came to prominence out of need, born from cucina povera, the resourceful cooking of poverty, built on cheap shelf-stable ingredients that stretched a little into a lot, it’s hard to resist the sexier story of puttanesca.

Forget the Sweet Nonna Story

When you think of Italian pasta sauce, you might picture stately nonnas in black dresses, hunched over steaming pots of red sauce, welcoming you into their kitchens for wholesome conversation and a lingering meal around the table. The whispered down the lane version of puttanesca that reached the States like a game of Telephone is far more titillating. In this version, savvy young women once stirred this sauce with a different kind of seduction in mind, not to welcome you into the kitchen, but to tempt you into… well, another room entirely.

Puttanesca translates loosely (no pun intended) to “prostitute.”

Meet the Squillo

The ladies in question were known as squillo, a word that describes the ringing of a telephone and a clever reference to call girl. Until 1958, brothels were legal in Italy. The women who ran them weren’t allowed to sell food or drink, but sex was legally on the menu. When the squillo served the aromatic puttanesca pasta, that was the closest they came to committing a crime.

Erase the Image of the Little Old Italian Lady

Replace the image of an old lady, white hair under a kerchief, apron securely tied and mappina in hand waiting to serve her husband dinner, with a less expected scene. To live up to the lore, the cooks in the brothel appeared with hair pinned, lips painted, heels kicked off in a small tiled kitchen between clients. They weren’t housewives. They weren’t chefs. But they knew how to make something bold, fast and unforgettable.

“Everything You See, I Owe to Spaghetti.” — Sophia Loren

A Sauce Born of Seduction

Italy in the 1950s was not big on feminism. Machismo ruled and bombshell movie stars like Sophia Loren flaunted their sex appeal. In that world, a pasta sauce created by and named after ladies of the night could hardly seem scandalous. The folklore of puttanesca changes from person to person and region to region. Some claim the squillo hailed from Rome, others insist Naples. American culinary mythology claims the women who created puttanesca sauce were professionals working the late shift, concocting a briny, spicy aphrodisiac of a meal that called to clients.

The Quick Fix Between Clients

One story claims the squillo relied on this spicy dish because it was quick and simple to whip up in between clients. If you’ve ever smelled puttanesca simmering on the stove, you know it was just a decoy. The ladies used this enticing combination of ingredients — anchovies, garlic, olives and capers — to lure their clients with its heady aroma. But just one taste could debunk this theory. What man could resist the intoxicating combination of tomatoes intermingled with the salt and bite of this dish? Surely this competition would have been bad for business.

You Probably Have All the Ingredients…or You Should

Puttanesca is one of those dishes that sounds intimidating, but you can make it with the most basic items in your pantry, that is, if your pantry belongs to a feisty Italian lady who’s ready for anything. Luckily, you can easily mimic her pantry. Adopting the rest of the persona is optional. One taste of puttanesca with its salty, subtle fish flavor, tangy capers and pop of heat in the tomatoes, and you’ll understand just how tempting it is. It’s dinner with a side of drama!

Created Around What Was on Hand

The classic ingredients work so well together that assembling them into my own recipe was intuitive. I knew more about the salacious origin story than the how-to, except that it’s tomato-based with some amount of olives, capers and anchovies. These ingredients reflect the struggles of the southern Italian cucina povera, where using everything you had and wasting nothing was imperative for survival. For me, ingredients packed in salt and oil to remain shelf stable are a matter of convenience. Once cheap staples to feed families during hard times, these items are now high-priced indulgences. The first time I made puttanesca, I had every necessary ingredient available right down to a half full container of olives that were at the use ’em or lose ’em stage. Recipe development is sometimes part gut, part precision and part what’s available in my kitchen right now. And so a favorite recipe was created around the olives I had left in my fridge.

A Sauce You’ll Love Making Better Than a Restaurant

The ingredients are easy to keep on hand. A good brand of canned, whole, peeled tomatoes are a pantry must-have that you’ll use for many other dishes as well. Capers, anchovies and even olives come in glass jars that last for months, that is, if you don’t use them up sooner. Once you have the basics in stock, this sauce comes together quickly. Let yourself indulge in a little la dolce vita with none of the scandal but all of the swagger.

Dinner with a Side of Drama

It’s perfect to make on a work night as its questionable origin would suggest. After all, the ladies hardly had time for a complicated meal when they were working. If you’ve never had it before, let yours be the first version you try. I have faith in your ability to ruin yourself for restaurant puttanesca forever. Plus, that slightly smug feeling of ‘I can make this better’ is fun every now and then.