FOOD & BEVERAGE TRENDS
My Signature Dish: Cioppino Cal Poly’s Chartwells Higher Ed Chef Chris Dunham learned how to make the Italian-American seafood stew from his aunt, and it’s his go-to when someone says, “Make me something good.” F irst things first: Cioppino is a seafood stew, it’s pronounced “chip-EE-no” and it’s absolute- ly divine. Cioppino is also a great example of immigrants coming to America with their cooking know-how and traditions and then us- ing the ingredients available to them, wasting nothing and creating complete- ly new, entirely American dishes. The story of cioppino is an immigrant story and like any good piece of food history, there’s a bit of legend to it that can’t be proven or disproven. The part we know for sure: Italian immigrants in the late 1800s came to San Francisco and started fishing. They were mostly from the Genoa region of Italy. At the end of a long day out on fishing boats in the cold, rough water, the Ital- ian fishermen would come back to the dock and start sharing their catch of the day, adding ocean fresh seafood to a big kettle along with crushed tomatoes and Italian aromatics. Everyone chipped in. Here’s where the story gets a little murky: legend has it that shouts of “Chip in, chip in!” echoing over the dock some- how morphed into the word “cioppino.” BY TARA FITZPATRICK
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PHOTO COURTESY OF CHARTWELLS HIGHER ED
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