A Holiday Treat: Dive into Cioppino (with a Famous Recipe Too)
Ready to eat! Phil’s Famous Ciopinno from Phil’s Fish Market.
A lot of delicious flavors are simmering in any given pot of Monterey Bay cioppino.
That includes delicate Dungeness crab meat, tender peel-and-eat shrimp, tasty calamari, succulent scallops, melt-in-the-mouth rock cod, flavorful little neck clams and slippery mussels, all woven together with hints of saffron, red chili pepper, garlic, butter and white wine.
That said, around Monterey Bay, some of cioppino’s most intriguing elements are tasty in a different way, namely local history and family heritage.
Anthony Davi provides helpful perspective on that front. He’s a real estate lawyer by trade, but he’s also a former cook on commercial fishing boats, grandson to a professional Monterey fisherman, and godson of cioppino legend Phil DiGirolamo of Phil’s Fish Market & Eatery fame. (Phil’s recently relocated to Castroville from Moss Landing—where Phil’s Snack Shack & Deli still remains—and whose recipe for the stew appears below).
And come spring of every year, he’s the lead chef behind the massive amount of fish stew crafted for the sure-fire sellout, “Ciao! Ciopinno!” benefit raising money for Monterey-based nonprofit Legal Services for Seniors.
Delicious Ciopinno in the works!
Part of his perspective is something I’ve never heard in a lifetime of loving cioppino, but one that makes sense: Davi draws similarities between 1800s Italian American fishermen in North Beach San Francisco sharing leftovers from the day’s catch to the time-honored fable of “stone soup.” In that tale, a charming traveler talks a village’s stingy residents into helping pitch in to create a wondrous stew despite the traveler’s own lack of ingredients.
“The history of the dish always struck me as having parallels to ‘stone soup,’ with it being created by way of contributions from multiple sources, each standing to reap the benefit of something not just greater than the individual ingredients, but arguably greater than the sum of its parts,” Davi says. “It seems safe to assume the first fishermen making cioppino did not start with fresh water and a stone, but they may have started with a base sauce and then cleverly communicated their way to the first pot of cioppino.”
While the dish’s Italian-Californian roots are widely agreed upon, reports vary on the name.
Some believe the inspiration might be “il ciuppin,” meaning “little soup” depending on who you ask and what language you’re translating from. Others attest it’s a different twist on ciuppin, based on a Genoan word meaning “chopped” (as in chopping up the day’s spare catch).
Phil DiGirolamo standing outside of Phil’s Fish Market
Another theory syncs more with Davi’s “stone soup” comparison: Some believe cioppino functioned as an Italian-accented way to say, “chip in” what you can. (Chip-een-o!)
Whatever the case, there’s no debate Italian-American DiGirolamo has developed one of the better takes on the signature West Coast soup, and it’s his recipe Davi chose to spotlight for the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. As Phil’s restaurant makes sure to remind guests, it helped him beat Bobby Flay in a Food Network Showdown and now draws eaters from around the world.
Phil’s recipe appears here, and hopefully will appear on more and more Monterey plates this holiday season as a result.
He is clear about what separates his soup: the top ingredients Monterey Bay and the wider Golden State can provide.
“We use the freshest and the best seafood, and a lot of California tomatoes,” DiGirolamo says, “and we just make it with a lot of love.”
Learn more about Phil’s Fish Market and find the delicious Cioppino recipe here!