A few weeks ago, my neighbor, the one who introduced me to The Moosewood tomato salsa, strolled by the house, casually noting she was making a big pot of puttanesca, and wondered if we would like to join her. Well, as you can imagine, we did, and we gobbled up every olive, caper, and strand of the spaghetti clinging to the pot. Before I left that night, I snapped a photo of the recipe open on Sandra’s counter, and I’ve made the pasta once a week since. The hardest part about making the sauce is smashing a few cloves of garlic and coarsely chopping a half cup of olives. The rest comes from pantry staples: plum tomatoes, anchovies (a whole tin!), capers (a whole jar!). After an hour of simmering — this is easy, not fast — the plum tomatoes break down, the anchovies dissolve, the cloves of garlic melt. The sauce can certainly be made ahead and the pasta cooked just before dinner, which makes for easy preparations at the dinner hour.
5 from 9 reviews If you are sensitive to salt, this may not be the dish for you, but cutting back the quantities of capers, anchovies and olives would reduce the saltiness. Also, a splash of heavy cream never hurts. Most recently I made this with Cascatelli, the new pasta shape created by Dan Pashman of The Sporkful podcast, and I have to say it did such a wonderful job of catching all of the irresistible bits of capers and olives in this dish. Most recently, I smashed the cloves of garlic, and even after the hour of cooking, they didn’t really break down as I had hoped — they were very large, too, which may have been part of the problem. Next time, I would mince or slice the cloves before adding. The original recipe calls for crushed garlic, which might mean through a garlic press, in which case the garlic would be very finely chopped.
