A good cioppino starts with a rich broth and ends with perfectly cooked fish.
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Cioppino Recipe – San Francisco Cioppino – A Spicy Fish Stew Recipe
Cioppino comes from San Francisco and the seafood you see there in a pan on the stove usually comes from the Pacific Ocean but its origins lie far away along the coast of Italy and the south of France where this type of tomato and seafood stew is common.
The word "cioppino" likely comes from "ciuppin" a Ligurian variant of these Mediterranean stews brought to San Francisco by Genoese immigrants more than a century ago. My copy of Alessando Molinari Pradelli's Italian cookbook La Cucina Ligure includes two versions of ciuppin. In one which the book describes as "particolare" to convey its relative foreignness the fish is left whole in the ciuppin; in the other which is presented as the more traditional version the fish is pureed to make a creamy broth much like a French bouillabaisse. It's worth noting that both of the ciuppin recipes in that book call for only finfish not the shellfish called for in a cioppino though I've found other Italian ciuppin recipes online that use a wider variety of seafood. In any case it is a bit of a fool’s errand to try to trace every detail of the origins of cioppino since fishermen and sailors of the Mediterranean have been travelling along the coast for thousands of years spreading cooking traditions as they go. That is after all why this type of soup has so many variations throughout the region.
To many Americans a bowl of cioppino may sound a lot like what they call bouillabaisse but that's a misconception. What is often dismissed here as "bouillabaisse" is actually just a saffron-inspired cioppino that sometimes has lobster in it. That Americanized "bouillabaisse" is undoubtedly delicious but it's also a far cry from what bouillabaisse is supposed to be.
