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]

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.)