Ping italophones and speakers of portuguese

[ritaxis]

I'm on the trail of cioppino. This is a fruits-de-mer kind of soup, of all kinds of fish and shellfish, depending on what you've got. It's native to San Francisco, where there was at one time a fishing fleet dominated by Italian-Americans. But the nice fellow's cousin's husband's mother (who is from near Padova) says there is no Italian dish and no word in Italian that correspond even partially. So I googled it in Italian and found a page which says that it's from the Pacific coast and also partly from Portugal. This is reasonable: there's a sizeable group here that comes from there. But when I google in Portuguese I find recipes that are clearly translated from English and a claim that the dish is Italian.

I'm not so worried about where the dish comes from, actually: biologists would call it "cosmopolitan," because where do you not find a mixed fish and sea trash soup? -- and really, since the tomato is cosmopolitan, too, you've got to find the tomato-based kind too. What I'm wondering about is the name. There's an onion sold at the farmer's market called "cippolino" which I think I'm supposed to think is an Italian onion (what I do think is that it's not good enough to pay $3.00 a pound for, not when the plain reds and yellows and whites are so good they'll knock your socks off).

I found a recipe for cialde, which my affinal relative makes magnificent ones of, but the recipe did not sound at all like her description.

Comments

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Cioppino is definitely an Italian word, and also definitely not a Portuguese word (just from its form). I know I've heard it, but at this stage I might have heard it in an American context rather than an Italian one. I'll do a quick search and let you know.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Ahh here we are. The dish is from Liguria, where it is called Ciuppin (or ciupin, I suspect -- northern Italian dialects are pretty vague about double consonants). Cioppino would be the standard italianization of that word.

The recipe at http://italianfood.about.com/od/fishsoups/r/blr0315.htm sounds pretty authentic, including the details about it being made with whatever fish was left over from the catch or the market stall -- being a strained-meat soup, it doesn't matter... (I even found an Italian recipe where the main ingredient is capon -- I would think that's an idiosyncratic variant though...)

If you need further details from Italian sites let me know, I don't mind finding out about food at all!

Cipollino (one p, two ls) (or cipollina, same thing) is indeed "small onion" in Italian, most often used for pickling/pickled onions or for scallions/spring onions.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thank you! My other source was Northern, but not from the coast, so maybe she never met a sea trash soup before she came to California and her husband went to work in the fish and poultry market.

The onions sould here by that name are small but not tiny. They're flat and come in pinkish and golden. I haven't seen the spring version of them that I knew (we do get alliums in all stages of their life cycle at the farmer's market, which is cool)

Thanks again!

Cialde, then. It's one of those cookies you make on a pizzelle iron and then roll up -- the recipe I found called for a couple of tablespoons of anisette and Nonni uses apparently a glass filled with vermouth, brandy and whisky (or maybe she was telling me how she made a home-made anisette to use in the cialde)

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

A lot of Italian cooking is intensely local, so dishes that are staple in one place might not be known in another place even fairly close if the cooking traditions are different (or they may be known by a completely different name). Padova is northern plains, rice country, and totally different from a culinary point of view from eastern Liguria/coastal northern Tuscany, despite being only a couple of hours' drive away... :-)

Cialde is going to be trickier, because it's a very generic name, basically it means "waffle", and depending on the area it can be e.g. hard or soft, never mind the actual ingredients and/or fillings. I'll have a look for recipes involving aniseed liqueur and report back, but don't hold your breath... (BTW, a mix of vermouth, brandy and whisky sounds lethal -- taste-wise I mean... but there's no accounting, etc.)

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Oh, right. I forgot that "cialde" is also the official name for the wafer things served with ice-cream (and the cones themselves are made of "cialda"). So that's what most Google searches bring up. Also a lot of recipes involving cialde (the ice-cream type, store-bought) and anisetta or other similar liqueurs.

It might help to know what part of Italy your relative is from -- which I should have asked first really... ("Cialda" sounds like a very Tuscan word to me, but people from other regions sometimes use Tuscan words because they have a way of turning up in dictionaries as "official Italian"...)