vol. 3: spaghetti alla puttanesca
indulging while the world burns
After a lot of mindless link-clicking this week, I wandered onto a website devoted to the lost ancient city of Pompeii. Most of you probably know the story: volcano erupts, city leveled overnight. As a kid, I was captivated by the idea that one day you’re walking around in your toga doing ancient stuff, and the next, poof! You’re frozen in ash for eternity. (I was a bit of a neurotic child.)
We’ve all grappled a lot in the past year with the same idea: that everything can be taken away from us in an instant, up to and including our very lives. Armed with the knowledge of our single wild and precious existences, many of us have indulged ourselves — our hopes and fears and ugly desires, and of course, our stomachs.
You can probably tell by now that our newsletter leans heavily on this indulgence. To use the old saw, we like to make “comfort food.” This is obviously not new terrain, especially within the popular food media landscape, which lately ranges from viral feta pasta Tik Toks to the grotesque absurdism of Chefclub. People love comfort food. Puttanesca — invented near Pompeii in Naples — is no exception to indulgence. It’s a truly luxurious meal you can conjure up from a nearly-bare pantry.
But comfort is complicated. There exists a growing backlash. People are sick of cooking, of interminable food blogging (like mine right now). They’re aghast at the excess, and demand piety. The New York Times’ Jane Brody really got my goat this week with an article entitled “The Pandemic as a Wake-Up Call for Personal Health.” Brody smugly explains that she’s managed to remain “weight-neutral” this year, and reminds fat people that if they just would put down the damn pizza, they wouldn’t be at risk for COVID-19 death. Simple! In a year of immense suffering and stress and privation, in a year where millions of people are newly food-insecure: it’s the sourdough that did it, not our inequitable food systems. Certainly not the demands of global capitalism. If we would just make the right joyless choices, sacrifice (eating) the right number of goats, the volcano wouldn’t be erupting.
Speaking of Pompeii, what I didn’t know as a child was that the city was absolutely coated with graffiti, shared in great detail on that site I mentioned. Some of it is very bawdy, some funny, some wistful. “Let everyone in love come and see,” one anonymous graffito reads. “I want to break Venus’ ribs with clubs and cripple the goddess’ loins. If she can strike through my soft chest, then why can’t I smash her head with a club?” Not all the writers were poets: “Apollinarius, doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here.” Pompeians were ordinary animals before they turned into dust. They were hungry to live, and so they indulged, Mt. Vesuvius’ long shadow notwithstanding. Consider their messages while you cook this week. As Mary Oliver put it, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Enjoy the pasta. —r
One thing I will consciously avoid in our recipes is using words like “wrong” or “right”.
I have no interest in perpetuating prescriptivist laws about food, and I don’t think anyone enjoys being browbeaten for enjoying the things they like. “You’re doing it wrong” is a real lose-lose for us both. All that said, a lot of people are making puttanesca wrong. When you see normally reliable sources like Epicurious (anchovy paste? basil!?) or YouTube’s Most Famous Torso (egg pasta? cheese!?) bumbling a classic dish, it’s definitely time to say something.
Puttanesca is a simple dish, a weeknight all-star that can come together in a half hour from shelf-stable ingredients that you probably have on hand already. It’s a loud and briny bomb of a pasta that exemplifies everything wonderful about Neapolitan food. I recognize that a lot of people are put off by anchovies, but they give this dish an umami-rich backbone, and if you’ve never cooked with them, consider this your gateway drug.
A note on some of the ingredients: My preferred tomatoes for any seafood pasta are canned cherry tomatoes. If you can’t find them, don’t sweat it, but if you can, they’re a little sweeter to offset the briny ingredients. Most (if not all) canned cherry tomatoes are packed with the skins on, and they’re a seedier variety than the plum tomatoes usually used for sauce, so I like to open the can into a sieve and smash them through to strain out the debris. The classic olives for puttanesca are Gaeta olives, but after hunting them down, I can’t say they make any difference in the finished dish when compared to regular old Kalamatas. I do recommend spending a little bit more money on your anchovies and tuna, the latter of which takes this from a light dinner to a filling meal.
Another note: an abbreviation you’ll see in many Italian recipes is “q.b.” for “quanto basta.” This simply means “as much as you need.” —j
SPAGHETTI ALLA PUTTANESCA
(serves two generously, three with a salad)
400 grams/14.5 ounces of canned whole tomatoes (that’s one small can)
3 cloves of garlic
1 large pinch of red pepper flakes
4 anchovy fillets
1 tablespoon of capers
12 Kalamata olives
1 can of tuna in olive oil
1 handful of parsley
1 handful of plain breadcrumbs (I use panko when I have it)
10 ounces of spaghetti
q.b. extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
to prep:
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.
Drain the canned tuna in a small strainer, reserving the oil. Drain the anchovies on paper towels.
Lightly crush and chop the garlic. Drain and roughly chop the capers and olives.
Wash and chop the parsley.
If using canned cherry tomatoes, press them through a strainer to remove seeds and skins.
Coat the bottom of a frying pan with olive oil and place over medium heat. Add the breadcrumbs, and stir them well until they are shiny from an even coating of oil. Toast them in the pan until they are lightly golden, stirring them intermittently so they cook evenly. Set the crumbs aside.
To cook:
Add the reserved oil from the tuna to a medium frying pan and add enough fresh olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Set it over medium heat.
When the oil begins to smell fragrant, add the garlic and the chili flakes, along with a pinch of salt and a couple of cracks of black pepper. You want the garlic to soften in the oil and smell delicious, while the chili flakes should stain the oil red.
Once this is achieved, add the anchovies and stir well. With a little coaxing, they’ll dissolve into the oil easily.
Add the olives and capers and give everything a good stir. After about a minute, add the tomatoes. If you’re using standard canned tomatoes instead of cherry tomatoes, use your spatula or spoon to break them up in the pan, and give everything a stir. Rinse the can with a little water and add it to the pot so no tomato goes to waste.
Simmer the sauce until the tomatoes have melted down. Taste for seasoning. It might actually need more salt than you’d expect. Once the sauce is about right, turn it down to a lower simmer.
Drop your pasta in the boiling water. Cook the spaghetti until they’re about a minute under al dente, then drain, reserving a quarter cup or so of the cooking water.
Add the spaghetti to the pan with the sauce and turn the heat up to medium-high. Toss everything together very well, adding the reserved pasta water and most of the parsley.
When the starch from the pasta water has worked its magic and the sauce has thickened enough to coat the pasta, taste a bite to make sure the spaghetti are done to your liking. If they are, kill the heat immediately and add the reserved canned tuna. Keep in mind that the fish is already cooked, and it won’t take much heat to turn it into sawdust.
Mix it all together one more time and set aside for a minute or two. This little bit of rest makes the pasta easier to plate and helps ensure all of the flavors are married.
Plate the spaghetti and top it with the reserved parsley, toasted breadcrumbs, a drizzle of olive oil, and some flaky sea salt if you have it. Enjoy with a glass of Punt e Mes from the fridge.
