Skillet & Sage

The regional table / California

Cioppino

Published October 7, 2026 · California

Cioppino with white fish, open clams and mussels, cracked Dungeness crab and parsley in tomato broth.
The crab goes in last and only to heat through. Everything that opens a shell has already salted the broth by the time it gets there.
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The oldest printed cioppino was written down by the chef of the Hotel St. Francis in 1918, and the oldest after that, from a reader in Petaluma, has no shellfish in it at all.

The word is older than any of its stories and it is in print in San Francisco in 1896. On 3 October that year the San Francisco Call ran its weekly sporting column, and in a paragraph on a party of anglers taken out of the wharf on a charter boat it reports that "The party caught rock and blue cod under the Alcatraz forts, just enough for a tasty 'chippino.'" The quotation marks are the newspaper's, the spelling is phonetic, and nothing is explained: a chippino is simply what you make at the end of a day's fishing out of what you caught. That is nineteen years before the modern spelling reaches a California page. In the California Digital Newspaper Collection the spelling "cioppino" first appears on 24 November 1915, the day before Thanksgiving, in a Los Angeles restaurant advertising column where a house on Hill Street near Fourth sets a cioppino of rock bass, "Italian Style", on its bill of fare between cold lobster with mayonnaise and sweetbread patties. The same archive shows how late the word went general. Searched across the whole run, "cioppino" returns one page in the 1910s, one in the 1920s, eighty-two in the 1930s and three hundred and twenty-five in the 1940s. As late as 28 December 1938 a syndicated column reaching Georgia had to gloss it for readers when Joe DiMaggio, asked about his family's restaurant, answered that "my special Joe Dimaggio Cioppino (Seafood Stew) is so good I'm losing money on it. I eat too much of it myself."

Two printed recipes survive from before the public-domain line, and both are from the Call. The first is Victor Hirtzler's, maître de cuisine of the Hotel St. Francis, printed in his newspaper column on Monday 25 February 1918 under the heading CIOPINO ALLA GENOVESE — Genoese, which is where the city's Italian fishermen came from. It runs: "Slice an onion very fine and fry in olive oil with one clove of garlic, a small carrot, a little celery and parsley, all chopped very fine, together with one well washed and boned anchovy, melted in hot olive oil and broken with a fork. After these ingredients have been fried add one-half glass of claret, about two pounds of black rock codfish, cut in portions, and some soft shell crabs." Dried mushrooms follow, then "a few ripe tomatoes chopped or one teaspoon of conserva (Italian tomato preserve)", water, "salt, pepper and a little allspice", and twenty minutes of boiling; and Hirtzler ends by saying that when black rock cod is not to be had almost any other fish will do the same. The second is three years later, on 9 April 1921, when the Call paid a dollar each for three readers' recipes and the first was "Cioppino (Italian Fish Stew)" from a reader on Sunnyslope Avenue in Petaluma, whose surname the scan does not render. Hers is the plainer and the more startling: two pounds of a solid, firm fish — "barracuda, striped bass or a large sole" — onion browned in olive oil, garlic and parsley added off the fire, then the fish in inch-thick slices with four large sliced tomatoes or a can of sauce, salt and pepper, and one instruction that is the whole technique: "Do not stir fish while cooking." No crab. No clams. No wine. Against the newspapers, the cookery books of the period are silent: Hirtzler's own Hotel St. Francis Cook Book of 1919, which prints a Bouillabaisse Marseillaise and uses the word crab a hundred and sixty-four times, does not contain cioppino under any spelling, and nor do A California Cook Book of 1916, the Landmarks Club Cook Book of 1903, Bertha L. Turner's Federation Cook Book of 1910 or the California Street M.E. Church Cook Book of 1911. The dish belonged to men who were not writing books. The federal fisheries survey found them where they lived: Goode's Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States reports that "The fishermen of San Francisco all live near the end of Vallejo street, about the Vallejo street wharf. The most of them are Italians, with some Slavonians, Greeks, Portuguese, and Spaniards", that the quarter had been theirs "since about 1850", that most could not read, and that those without families boarded at the Fisherman's Home or the Dalmazia Chop House for twenty-five cents a meal. The same survey names the crab — Cancer magister, "the common crab", seined off the sandy beaches south of the Golden Gate and sold three or four for twenty-five cents. This is their stew, and what follows is a pot built for a kitchen out of the 1918 and the 1921 recipes; the quantities are this page's own.

Why this version works

Do not salt until the shells have opened. USDA's composition tables explain why this pot salts itself. Raw clams carry 601 milligrams of sodium per hundred grams and blue mussels 286, against 74 for Pacific rockfish — so the liquor that runs out of a kilo of shellfish is a brine, and it is going into your broth. Season the base lightly, let the clams and mussels open, then taste and correct. Salted to perfection before the shellfish go in, the finished stew is reliably too salty to eat.

The anchovy disappears and does the work. Hirtzler is specific: "one well washed and boned anchovy, melted in hot olive oil and broken with a fork". Melted is the right word. An anchovy fillet put into warm oil collapses into it in a minute or two, and what it leaves behind is salt and savour with no fish flavour that anyone can name. Leave it out and the broth needs more salt to taste of the same amount, which is the usual sign that something was carrying more than its weight.

The fish goes in last and is not stirred. The Petaluma recipe of 1921 gives the instruction flat — "Do not stir fish while cooking" — and the numbers say why it matters. Pacific rockfish is 79 percent water and 1.34 grams of fat per hundred, so the pieces hold together by structure alone, and a spoon dragged through a simmering pot turns them into cloudy shreds. Lay the fish on top of the liquid, put the lid on, and let steam and heat do it. Six or seven minutes is the whole of it.

The base is built before any shell comes near it. Both period recipes open the same way and in the same order: onion sliced very fine into olive oil, then garlic and parsley, then the liquid. Hirtzler adds a small carrot and a little celery, chopped as fine as the onion, and that is not a garnish — it is the sweetness that stops a tomato broth tasting raw and tinny. Give it a full ten minutes of quiet frying before anything wet arrives. Everything after this step happens fast, so this is the only part of the dish where time is yours to spend.

Ingredient notes

The crab: one cooked Dungeness crab, cleaned and cracked, about two pounds in the shell. Buy it cooked, which is how it is nearly always sold, and have the counter clean and crack it or do it yourself with the back of a knife. It is going into the pot only to heat through, so a live crab bought and boiled at home gains you nothing here but a second pot. The shell is worth keeping: broken up and simmered in the broth for twenty minutes before straining, the body shell is the cheapest depth this dish can buy.

The fish: rockfish is the documented one and still the right one — Hirtzler asks for black rock cod, the 1896 anglers caught rock and blue cod under Alcatraz, and Goode's survey has the lateen boats going out to the Farallones on trawl-lines for exactly this fish. Lingcod, halibut, cod or striped bass all work; the 1921 reader allowed barracuda or a large sole. What does not work is anything thin, oily or flaky-soft, which vanishes into the broth.

Clams and mussels: a pound of each, scrubbed under cold water, and mussels debearded by pulling the tuft towards the hinge. Discard any that stay open when tapped, and after cooking discard any that stayed shut. Clams are the grittier of the two: an hour in cold salted water before cooking lets them spit out sand that would otherwise end up in the bottom of every bowl.

Tomato, wine and the aromatics: a tin of whole tomatoes crushed by hand, plus a spoonful of tomato paste standing in for Hirtzler's conserva, and red wine rather than white, because 1918 says claret and it is the better answer — the broth wants body. Parsley goes in twice, half at the start and half at the end. The allspice is Hirtzler's and it is worth a pinch; a second pinch makes the pot taste of baking.

Step by step

  1. Fry the base slowly. Warm the olive oil in a wide heavy pot over medium-low heat. Add the onion, carrot, celery and half the parsley, all chopped fine, and cook 10 minutes without colouring. Add the garlic, the chilli flakes and the anchovies and stir for 2 minutes, pressing the anchovies with the back of the spoon until they have melted into the oil.
  2. Wine, then tomato. Pour in the wine and let it boil hard for 3 minutes until the smell of alcohol is gone. Stir in the tomato paste and cook it a minute, then add the crushed tomatoes, the water or fish stock, the bay leaf, the allspice and a modest half teaspoon of salt. Bring to a simmer.
  3. Simmer the broth, with the crab shell if you have it. Drop in the broken body shell of the crab if you cleaned it yourself. Simmer uncovered 20 minutes, until the broth has lost its raw edge and reduced a little. Fish out the shell and the bay leaf. Taste it now and remember what it tastes like; do not fix the salt yet.
  4. Clams first, then mussels. Raise the heat to a strong simmer. Add the clams, cover, and cook 4 minutes. Add the mussels, cover again, and cook 3 to 4 minutes more, until nearly all the shells have opened. Discard any that have not.
  5. Fish on top, lid on, no spoon. Lay the fish pieces on the surface of the broth in a single layer, cover, and cook 6 to 7 minutes on the lowest simmer that still moves. Do not stir. The fish is done when a piece parts under gentle pressure and is opaque to the middle.
    Intact white fish pieces poaching in one layer above tomato broth and open shellfish.
    Lay the fish on top and cook gently without stirring, until it is opaque and parts under light pressure.
  6. Crab last, and the seasoning with it. Tuck the cracked crab pieces in around the edges, cover, and give them 3 minutes to heat through. Now taste the broth and correct the salt and pepper — this is the first and only moment to do it. Scatter the rest of the parsley over the top.
  7. Serve it in the pot. Ladle into wide bowls, with crab in every one, and put grilled sourdough rubbed with a cut garlic clove on the table along with a bowl for shells and a pile of napkins. It is eaten with the hands as much as with a spoon.
Two things go wrong and both are recoverable if you catch them. Grit in the bottom of the bowl means the clams were not purged; strain the whole broth through a sieve lined with a damp cloth into a clean pot, pick the seafood out of the sieve, and reunite them — annoying, but nothing is lost, and next time give the clams an hour in cold salted water first. Overcooked fish is the other, and it comes from stirring or from putting the fish in too early: once it has gone woolly and shredded you cannot bring it back, so lift the shellfish and crab out, call what is left a broth, and serve it over the bread as a soup, which is honestly how a good deal of it was eaten on the wharf. If the broth tastes thin, the fault is usually that the base was rushed; a spoonful more tomato paste cooked in for a minute and ten minutes of hard reduction with the lid off will do more than any amount of salt.

Storage and make-ahead

Make the broth ahead and the dish becomes a twenty-minute dinner. The base through the end of the simmering step keeps 3 days refrigerated and 3 months frozen, and it is better on the second day; bring it back to a strong simmer and start at the clams. That is also the way to cook it for a crowd without standing over a pot while people wait.

Finished cioppino does not keep well, because reheating cooks everything a second time. If you have leftovers, pick the meat out of the shells, keep it separate from the broth in the fridge, and use both within 2 days: heat the broth to a simmer, take it off the heat, and stir the seafood in to warm for a minute. Never boil it again, and do not freeze it with the shellfish in.

What to serve with it

Sourdough, and plenty of it — grilled, rubbed with garlic, and used as a tool rather than a side. Hirtzler's own bouillabaisse in the 1919 book ends with the same instruction, slices of bread fried in oil and then rubbed with garlic, which was clearly just how the city ate a fish stew.

To drink, the red that went into the pot or anything dry and sharp enough to cut the tomato. Nothing else needs to be on the table: this is a one-pot dinner that leaves a wreck of shells behind it, and a salad only gets in the way.

Cioppino with white fish, open clams and mussels, cracked Dungeness crab and parsley in tomato broth.

From the recipe box / California

Cioppino

Rock cod, Dungeness crab, clams and mussels in a tomato and red wine broth built on onion, garlic, parsley and a melted anchovy — the San Francisco fishermen's stew, worked out from the two earliest printed recipes, both of them from 1918 and 1921.

Prep
30 min
Cook
45 min
Total
1 hr 15 min
Serves
6
Calories
330 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Fry the onion, carrot, celery and half the parsley in the olive oil over medium-low heat for 10 minutes without colouring, then add the garlic, chilli flakes and anchovies and stir 2 minutes until the anchovies melt.
  2. Boil the wine hard for 3 minutes, stir in the tomato paste, then add the crushed tomatoes, stock, bay leaf, allspice and ½ teaspoon salt.
  3. Simmer uncovered 20 minutes with the crab body shell in the pot if you have it, then remove the shell and bay leaf.
  4. Add the clams, cover and cook 4 minutes; add the mussels, cover and cook 3 to 4 minutes more, discarding any that stay shut.
  5. Lay the fish on top of the broth in one layer, cover, and cook 6 to 7 minutes without stirring, until it parts under gentle pressure.
  6. Tuck in the cracked crab, cover for 3 minutes to heat through, then taste and correct the salt and pepper for the first time.
  7. Scatter the remaining parsley over and serve in wide bowls with grilled sourdough rubbed with garlic.

Nutrition

Fat13 g (2 g saturated)
Sodium820 mg
Protein34 g
Servingabout 2 cups with crab, bread not counted
Calories330
Cholesterol95 mg
Carbohydrates15 g (8 g sugar, 3 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

Red wine or white?

Red. Hirtzler specifies "one-half glass of claret" and it is the better instruction, because this is a tomato broth that wants weight behind it rather than brightness. White wine cioppino is common and perfectly good, and it makes a lighter, sharper pot that suits an all-shellfish version. If you go that way, keep the tomato down and the parsley up.

Why is it in no old cookbook?

Because the people who cooked it were not the people who published. Goode's federal survey of the San Francisco fishery records that few of the wharf fishermen could read, that they lived in lodgings at the end of Vallejo Street and ate at chop-houses for twenty-five cents, and that the quarter had been theirs since about 1850. The dish reaches print the way such dishes do — sideways, in a sports column in 1896, on a restaurant card in 1915, in a chef's newspaper column in 1918 and in a reader's prize recipe in 1921 — while five California cookery books published between 1903 and 1919, including the St. Francis chef's own, do not contain the word at all.

Where does the name come from?

Nothing reachable settles it, and the honest evidence is the spelling itself. The first appearance found in California print, in the San Francisco Call of 3 October 1896, is "chippino" in quotation marks — a reporter writing down a word he had heard rather than read. The first recipe, Hirtzler's of 1918, calls it Cioppino alla Genovese, which points at Liguria and at the Genoese fish stews the city's fishermen grew up on. A syndicated food column of 20 July 1977 summed up the state of play fairly: cioppino "is a free-style dish that has survived the controversy of its creation", and "actually is an American dish". The leftovers-of-the-day's-catch story that usually follows is at least consistent with the 1896 line, where a boatload of anglers catch rock and blue cod under Alcatraz and have "just enough for a tasty 'chippino.'"

Does it have to have crab in it?

The record says no and the city says yes. The 1921 recipe in the Call is nothing but firm fish, onion, garlic, parsley and tomato, and Hirtzler in 1918 reaches not for Dungeness but for soft shell crabs. What the Dungeness has on its side is that it was always there: the federal fisheries survey of the 1880s names Cancer magister as the common crab of the San Francisco market, seined off the beaches between the city and the sea at about a pound each and sold three or four for twenty-five cents. Make it without crab and you have made the 1921 version; make it without fish and you have made something else.