Cioppino, such as is made by the fishermen, is prepared as follows. For five people use from three to five pounds of fish sliced in fairly large pieces, then prepare one or two onions, depending on size, by chopping them up quite fine. Place in a stewpot one-half cup of olive oil (salad oil may be used) and add the onions, frying them until yellow, in the meantime adding several cloves of garlic, and a little parsley. Add a can of tomatoes (raw tomatoes may be used) and cook for about ten minutes. If potatoes are used (a great many never use potatoes in the preparation), they should then be added and cooked for five or ten minutes. Add the fish, covering it well with the tomatoes, onions, etc., season with salt, and rather highly with pepper or paprika, put on the lid, and let simmer until done. Don’t stir. A little water may be added if desired. Serve in a deep plate. Cioppino may be poured over French or Italian bread.
Reading the sentence that named the few things the fishermen brought with them—bread, wine, coffee, the ingredients (minus the fish) for their stew—I felt that pleasantly eerie sensation of a mental nickel dropping into its slot. InA Tuscan in the Kitchen Pino Luongo tells of thematerassai who once came every spring to Italian households to air the stuffing of the mattresses. They carried with them for their lunch a flask of wine, a loaf of bread, a coldfrittata di pasta, a flask ofcondimento per insalata, and an empty salad bowl, knowing they would find all the greens they needed in the neighboring fields.
So, too, with these Californianpescatori on their wave-tossed wooden boat out in the immensity of the Pacific. The net is hauled in and emptied onto the deck, which is immediately awash with a shimmering pile of wildly thrashing fish. Even as this catch is being sorted through, one of the fishermen is coaxing a pile of kindling into a fire in the tiny galley stove while he chops up an onion or two and minces some garlic cloves with his scaling knife. These he tosses with some salt, dried oregano, and hot pepper flakes into the olive oil awaiting them in the bottom of the large, soot-coated cast-iron pot. He sets this over the flames, and as the mixture begins to gently sizzle he selects several of the fish from the catch around him. He guts and scales them, then cuts them into chunks and tosses them, heads and all, into the pot. When that is full, some tomato paste is added, and promptly diluted with an ample ration of wine.50
Soon the air is full of the savory aroma of wood smoke and simmering fish. As the rest of the crew gathers around, the cook adds the final touch, tipping the flask of olive oil over the pot and anointing his creation with a delicate drizzle of oil, which floats on top of the stew in a lace of golden drops. A large loaf of staling bread is drawn from a canvas sack and passed from hand to hand, each eater tearing off a piece to be dunked and refreshed in the rich, sea-salty broth. The meal is eaten directly from the pot, the chunks of fish falling apart into delicate flakes the moment they are captured by a spoon.
Leonard Bernstein once remarked that the mark of a great artistic achievement is that it is at once fresh and inevitable, and this neatly encapsulates what is so special here. This cioppino is fresh—and not only for the obvious reason that its major ingredients still drip of the sea. It is fresh because each time it is made the choice of fish is both spontaneous and unique. Every day the catch is different, every day the dish is invented anew—this time with a single fish large enough to feed the crew, the next with a mess of assorted fry, and on and on.
Inevitability in a dish is often a matter of—in the best meaning of the term—economy. This shipboard cioppino, for all its offhand simplicity, is—in the way it makes the best possible use of what is at hand and in the way that what is at hand has been pared down to a few carefully chosen essentials—as tightly argued as any philosophical proposition. Those who see cooking merely as a chore can never know how a dish like this—however often it’s made—can continue to offer the cook intellectual satisfaction so intense as to be almost sensual.
As Sherlock Holmes was wont to complain, the more brilliant the deduction, the more self-evident it will seem once explained. The second of the two documents that entirely reversed my opinion of cioppino was an essay on that dish by Johan Mathiesen, which he has kindly allowed me to reprint here (see pages 302–4). As you will see, he relates how, when he lived on the Pacific coast of Oregon, he learned to make cioppino from Chuck, a biker-cum-fisherman, who had himself picked it up from other fisherman in California and who then brought it with him when he moved up the coast. Chuck, he writes, “taught me that cioppino was not something holy and sacrosanct, but rather the natural result of cooking together what you probably had around the house anyway.”
Shift Bernstein’s “inevitable” from the passive to the active and what you have—at least when applied to cioppino—is something along the lines of “compellingly obvious.” Chuck was neither a studier of cookbooks nor an amateur chef. He had absorbed the making of cioppino because, once he saw it done, he felt right away not only that he could do it himself but that he definitely wanted to. And Johan, although hewas a cookbook reader, underwent the same epiphany—because to watch Chuck prepare cioppino put it not in the category of recipe perceived but of experience lived, a very different kind of apprehension.
I remember feeling something similar when, in a visit to a Manhattan Gallic expatriate hangout called Pierre au Tunnel, I first encounteredsoupe à l’oignon —an encounter that eventually prompted my first bit of culinary writing51—and then again when I first met up with rice and beans. There needn’t be any educative intention: something contagious passes from the cook to you, leaving your hands itching to go straight to your own kitchen to make the dish yourself.
That this kind of nonverbal culinary transmission can happen at all is amazing enough, but what really astonishes is its nearly genetic ability to breed true. Put Johan’s encounter with cioppino beside that of H. B. Nidever’s and you can’t help but notice how much the grandson resembles the grandfather, despite the fact that in the generation between, social mobility has been paid for in the usual dilution of character. (It would make a great movie, with Al Pacino cast as the all-too-prosperous restaurateur dad, John Cusack as the rebellious grandson, and Robert Duvall as the rough-hewn family patriarch, Il Cioppino.)
Once such a dish is appropriated into the realm of recipe, it becomes codified, and so its consistent replication comes as no surprise. But in vernacular cooking, when the bloodline of a dish runs true generation after generation—as, say, that of hoppin’ John has in the Deep South—it is a sure sign that it has reached a state of enduring perfection.
This is doubly the case with cioppino, where the same thing has happened on both the Mediterranean and Pacific coasts, at least if one accepts the argument that cioppino’s origins lie in a traditional Genoese seafood soup calledil ciuppin.52 Usually, these days, this is prepared as a purée, but inThe Classic Food of Northern Italy, Anna Del Conte offers a cioppino-like version that is the specialty of the house at the Ristorante Angiolina in Sestri Levanti on the Italian Riviera. Del Conte makes no mention of—and may never have encountered—“cioppino,” but she might as well have been taking photographs at a Ciuppin/Cioppino family reunion, so clearly does her recipe reflect their common features.
IL CIUPPIN DI SESTRI LEVANTI
(adapted fromThe Classic Food of Northern Italy, by Anna Del Conte)
[serves4]
The author notes that when the dish was served to her at the Ristorante Angiolina the chunks of fish still contained “their bones and other bits and pieces, only the head being removed, something that Italians, like the Orientals, do not mind, but that annoys the British.” This is exactly how I imagine our shipboard fisherman’s cioppino, fish head included.
¼ cup olive oil
1 medium onion, 1 celery stalk, and 1 carrot, all cut small
2 garlic cloves, minced
½ cup dry white wine
1 pound assorted white-fleshed fish, such as hake, dogfish, whiting, or haddock, cut into large chunks
4 cups boiling water
½ cup canned plum t
omatoes, with their juice, chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
4 thick slices of country-style Italian bread
1 to 2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
Add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil to a large saucepan and gently sauté the vegetables and all but ½ teaspoon of the chopped garlic in it for 10 minutes over medium heat, stirring frequently. Pour in the wine, turn up the heat, and cook for another 5 minutes, until the wine is reduced by one-third. Add the pieces of fish and sauté gently for 5 minutes, turning them frequently.
Pour over 4 cups of boiling water and add the tomatoes and seasoning. Bring the soup back to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning.
Meanwhile, toast the bread in the oven broiler. Mix the reserved ½ teaspoon garlic into the remaining olive oil. Lightly brush the toasted bread with this mixture, placing the slices in the bottom of individual deep soup bowls. Ladle theciuppin over the bread. Drizzle on any remaining garlic-flavored oil, sprinkle with the parsley, and serve.
Can any firm distinctions be drawn between cioppino andciuppin —or any of the many other similar native Italian or Mediterranean fish stews? The answer is probably no, although cioppino is usually made with red rather than white wine, and without water, so that it is notably dense with fish. Also, the bread that accompanies cioppino is—if one can get it—a sourdough loaf, and it is torn apart at the table and dunked into the broth rather than being sliced, toasted, and served as achapon at the bottom of the bowl.
This lack of a unique identity, however, is a mark of cioppino’s authenticity. Like any vernacular dish that has endured through the years, it is able to generate at need a new member of the tribe—niece or nephew, grandchild, or cousin once removed—that is appropriate to the demands of the moment but that also exhibits those inherited characteristics that set the family apart.
If cioppino as flashy impresario of the old-time San Francisco restaurant scene was no one I wanted to invite into my kitchen, this other cioppino, natural child of the fishing boats, had won first my interest, then my sympathy, and finally my appetite. However, before I could set out to make a version that might possess any claim to this same birthright, I had to follow the logic of the dish through one last, unexpected twist.
The first time my father went to Italy to visit his family there, they sent us some olive oil and it was like nothing I’d ever had. We started using it to make the same marinara sauce that my father remembered my grandmother making. There was a world of difference in that sauce between using plain olive oil, which was easily obtained, and this extra-virgin olive oil.
— Nancy Verde Barr,We Called It Macaroni
For me—as, I expect, for any reader who might have already chanced upon this dish—cioppino is about seafood. What seems so special about it—especially when concocted onboard a fishing boat—is the freshness and abundance and choiceness of the fish. For the fishermen themselves, however, that aspect of the dish was so ordinary, it was hardly worth noticing. A net full of fresh fish is to them what a bin heaped with grain is to the peasant who farms the land—nothing to be scorned, certainly, but the dish’s necessary foundation rather than its defining ornamentation.
To see cioppino through their eyes, then, I had to shift my gaze from the bubbling kettle of fish on the deck of the tiny fishing boat to the flask held carefully by the fisherman cook as he anointed his stew with a dribble of precious golden oil. At first, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, until a certain sentence of H. B. Nidever’s account—“But the [cioppino] generally prepared by the fisher folk is very simple and inexpensive, the olive oil used being the most expensive ingredient”—collided with a passage written by Spencer and Cobb, which reveals how a touch of condescension can dull even a lively and curious palate.53(On the other hand, in their favor, the two authors are adamant in their defense of garlic.)
As to the oil used in this dish, the Italian, of course, would scorn any other oil than that of the olive, for this is the one luxury which is his necessity, no matter how little he has to spend on food. To the average American, who is no connoisseur, fortunately for his purse, so far as oil is concerned, corn oil, cottonseed, or any preferred brand of salad oil may be used with equal results.
This peculiar edginess regarding the cost of olive oil—and I suspect we are hardly talking about extra-virgin olive oil—inadvertently points us to an important distinction between the dishes of the working poor and those that spring from our own middle-class foodways.
Peasant food is rooted as a matter of course in what is abundant and cheap, enhanced when possible by calculatedly careful touches of the expensive: the grating of Parmesan, the paper-thin sliver of prosciutto, the drizzle of olive oil. Our cooking lays its emphasis on ample provision of the relatively expensive and relegates what is abundant and cheap to the background—where it is sometimes not eaten at all. This means that very expensive items traditionally used primarily to point up what we ourselves push to the back of the plate—say, the forty-dollar truffle shaved over the bowl of pasta—make us anxious, since they fly in the face of our sense of value. This is why the “average American,” who would think nothing—should the cash be at hand—of treating himself to a sixteen-ounce sirloin, be he connoisseur or no, still considers it only sensible, even today, to replace “costly” olive oil with that pressed from cottonseed.
My point is not that this bias is wrong—what we are talking about, after all, is competing conceptions of extravagance—but that if you call it into consciousness you begin to grasp the inversion that cioppino had to undergo in order to grace a San Francisco restaurant table. The emphasis no longer fell on the preciousness of the oil, the ethnic signatory power of the tomato paste and the garlic, but on an opulence more likely to appeal to theamour-propre of the most desirable patrons, and so loosen their wallets.
As I began contemplating how I would make this dish myself, I found that I was under the sway of neither the one nor the other of these contrary visions, but held in a state of tension between them. If I could not return to a world where extra-virgin olive oil is measured by the drop and tomato paste lovingly put up by hand, I was at least freed from the image of a dish swollen with the highest-ticket items in the fishmonger’s case. All the necessary components—the fresh seafood, tomato, wine, garlic, olive oil, bread—had now achieved equal weight. “To make cioppino” became an act of finding the delicate—and, for us, the right-seeming—balance among them.
As I began searching out cioppino recipes in contemporary cookbooks, I was a little taken aback to learn that it is now often considered a crab dish (by which I mean, when prepared at its simplest, it is madesolely of crab). However, such a transition was inevitable the moment cioppino stepped ashore, and this did not at all mean that it stepped out of character. Crab is abundant on the Pacific Coast, and for many years it was there for anyone’s taking—the next best thing to having the perks of a fisherman’s wife.
Although at the time that I wrote this we lived on the Maine coast, where fresh-picked crabmeat was available down the road almost three whole seasons of the year, and despite the fact that something about the slightly pungent edge to even the freshest of crabmeat means that it stands up well to the robust flavors of tomato and wine, we soon discovered that we preferred to make our cioppino with fish—either cod, haddock, or pollock. This is partly because crabmeat is already cooked and so must be added at the end of the cooking process, while the fish is poached in the sauce and so adds more of its own flavor to the stew. But there is also that matter of balance, of emphasis. A cioppino made with crab is a crab cioppino; one made with cod is cioppino, pure and simple, since the fresh fish melds deliciously into the whole.
This elementalness is also reflected in the sauce that provides our cioppino’s base. Sea-made cioppino might originally have depended on tomato paste—perhaps augmented with canned tomatoes—but, as H. B. Nidever attests, onshore it was prepared in a simple, classic ma
rinara sauce. This is usually distinguished from other tomato-based sauces by a quick preparation, one that allows tomatoes, if fresh, to retain some of their texture and simple garden sweetness. It is thus an ideal medium in which to cook seafood, since it, too, should remain in the pot for as short a time as possible. (Indeed, marinara sauce reputedly takes its name from the fact that fishermen’s wives could have it ready the moment their husbands arrived home with the day’s catch.)
As Matt and I worked our way to our own version of cioppino, we hoped to find some aura of marinara freshness in the new all-natural, organic tomato sauces that had started to appear in our local natural foods store. However, these turned out to have the same tomato-paste-thickened texture and overcooked taste of their supermarket predecessors—which too much dominate any seafood dish. Consequently, when fresh tomatoes are not available, we turn to imported Pomì chopped tomatoes, which—because the aseptic packaging allows them to be minimally processed, without any addition of salt or calcium chloride—are surprisingly light, clean-tasting, and tomato-y. Finally, most cioppino recipes we found added a green bell pepper to the sauce. We liked this touch but prefer a red or yellow bell pepper, which adds texture and sweetness without any vegetative sharpness. Here, then, is our own addition to the family album—cioppino as a delicious, swiftly and casually prepared everyday dish.
MAINE COAST CIOPPINO
[serves 2]
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus a little for anointing purposes
1 medium onion, chopped
1 red or yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped
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