Cioppino: The San Francisco Dish That Speaks Genoese

On San Francisco menus, cioppino – a stew of fish, tomato and wine – is an institution. The name is Genoese: cioppin. Its biography, though, reads like an ocean-going novel: it turns up in California by 1908, before Genoese dictionaries even recorded the word (Frisoni, 1910); the Río de la Plata has its twin, chupín; and the word surfaces as far away as Gibraltar and Peru – wherever Ligurians dropped anchor.

A word that sailed out from Genoa, or one that sailed back? Scholars still argue. Either way, every spoonful of cioppino tells a piece of the story of Ligurian emigration.