Anchovy Sauce
Take herrings, dip in oil or melted butter, season with salt and pepper and broil. While fish are broiling, take small jar of Anchovy paste, dissolve in pan with butter, chopped parsley and juice of one lemon till warm, then spread sauce on fish and serve.
CIOPPINO-(Italian Fish Stew) Two pounds of fish together with ingredients in this recipe will be enough for four to five people. Use a solid, firm fish, such a large sole, striped bass, chili pepper. Barracuda or rock cod. Do not use salmon or halibut.
Take one good sized onion; chop up fine; put in pot with a little olive oil or butter and cook to a golden brown. Take pot off fire and add a little chopped parsley and garlic and then let cook about five minutes with slow fire, then take pot off fire and place fish in pot, piece by piece, about an inch thick, and add four medium sized, good, ripe tomatoes, chopped up or canned tomatoes to equal same; stir gently so as to mix ingredients with fish. Put on stove again and let cook twenty to twenty-five minutes with moderate fire. Season with salt and pepper to your own taste. Do not stir fish while cooking. (To be cooked in a pot that is used for boiling or stewing.)
Two recipes have run together on this page: broiled herring with a quick anchovy butter, and a cioppino that clearly came from a San Francisco Italian cook. Both are sound, but the printing has left a few gaps worth filling.
- The stray chili pepperIn the list of suitable fish — "a large sole, striped bass, chili pepper. Barracuda or rock cod" — the chili pepper is a typesetting error, almost certainly a line of ingredients that collapsed into the fish list. Treat it as optional seasoning for the stew rather than a fish.
- Anchovy paste quantityThe recipe calls only for a "small jar". Modern tubes run 1.5–2 oz; one tube dissolved into about 4 tablespoons of butter gives a workable proportion for the sauce.
- Broiling the herringWhole herring, split and flattened, want a hot broiler about 4 inches from the element: 3–4 minutes a side for a 10 oz fish. The oil-or-butter dip is what keeps the skin from welding to the rack.
- Warm the sauce, do not boil itAnchovy paste is heavily salted and will turn harsh and grainy if it simmers. Melt the butter, stir in the paste until smooth, add parsley and lemon off the heat. This is the hinge of the first recipe.
- The cioppino has no added liquidNothing but the tomatoes and the fish's own juices goes into the pot — no stock, no wine, no water. That is deliberate; the stew is meant to be thick and clinging, not soupy. Use tomatoes with their juice rather than drained.
- "Do not stir fish while cooking"The instruction is worth heeding. Firm fish in inch-thick pieces will still break apart once it sets; shake the pot by the handle if you need to move things, and lift portions out with a wide spatula.
- Twenty-five minutes is long by modern standardsBass or rock cod in inch pieces is done in 10–12 minutes at a bare simmer. The longer time suits the very gentle "moderate fire" of a coal or early gas range; on an electric hob, check at 12 minutes and pull the pot when the fish flakes.
- Why no salmon or halibutThe likeliest reason is texture: both tend to go dry in a long braise, and salmon's oil would dominate the tomato. Monkfish, snapper or a firm cod loin work in the same way.
- YieldThe stew is stated as four to five servings from 2 lb of fish. Serve it in shallow bowls with plenty of bread; the herring recipe states no yield.
Cioppino belongs to the Italian, largely Ligurian, fishing families of San Francisco's North Beach, where a stew was built from whatever the boats had not sold. The name is generally traced to the Genoese ciuppin, a fish soup from the Ligurian coast, though the San Francisco version diverged early by leaning on tomatoes and on the Pacific catch — rock cod, barracuda, striped bass, and later the Dungeness crab that now defines it. This version, with no crab or shellfish at all and no wine, is closer to the plain household original than to the restaurant dish. Its appearance alongside a simple broiled herring says something about the period: an immigrant recipe passed along in print, still carrying the cook's own voice in its warning not to stir the fish.