National Geographic Traveller (UK)

SOUP STORIES

Flavio Cerioni runs Alla Lanterna restaurant in Fano, Marche, alongside his wife, Elide. He talks about the history of the town’s legendary soup — brodetto — and what makes it so special

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One dish we find in all Italian ports is fish soup, and on the Adriatic, we call it brodetto. There’s a friendly rivalry between Marche and Emilia-Romagna about where it started, and here in Marche, there are three main kinds, from Fano, Porto Recanati and San Benedetto del Tronto.

Brodetto has always been made from trawler fish. Fano used to be the Adriatic’s second-biggest fishing port, and the boats would go away for a week at a time. They’d throw down the nets, drag them along the bottom and pull them up every half hour to sort the fish. Brodetto was born onboard.

People say it used to be made with less highly prized fish, but that’s not correct — for brodetto, they used the fish that were spoiled in the net, which gave rise to the saying, ‘The worse they were at fishing, the better they ate.’ They’d make it during the last few days of their trip, when their bread had hardened, so they’d throw that in the mix, too. And, because they didn’t have fresh vegetables on board, they’d add tomato concentrat­e and wine. The San Benedetto version is slightly different: their valley is full of green tomatoes and peppers, so they’d preserve them in vinegar and take them onboard.

In almost all brodetto, you’ll find gurnard, redfish and some kind of cephalopod — maybe a squid or a cuttlefish. There are no clams or mussels as it’s only trawler fish. That’s how it is on the Adriatic; on the Tyrrhenian side there’s a similar soup, cacciucco, but they use octopus as the base, which changes the taste.

Here in Fano, we have brodetto alla fanese, passed down from old fishermen cooks. Seven of us wrote down the official recipe and had it rubber-stamped by a notary. We call ourselves the Brodetto Confratern­ity. Now we have around 40 members, and every month we travel around the province, eating brodetto or having speakers talk about the ingredient­s.

To make it, you start with a soffritto of garlic and onion. You need to add more garlic if you’re using more crustacean­s, as they’re sweet; if you have a fish base, you need more onion. Then you add the squid, followed by the tomato concentrat­e mixed with water and vinegar. Leave it to evaporate until the vinegar smell has gone, then add the fish, cook for 18 minutes and it’s ready.

The method of cooking depends on who’s cooking it. On the boats, they cooked in thin, high pots because of the roll; in the confratern­ity, we use a 120cm-diameter pan, and add up to 70kg of fish. We add fresh bread that we cook for two minutes as a reminder of the days-old bread they used to eat. In the restaurant, we also do a more modern version using a carpaccio of the fish. My mum was the first cook here — she’s 90, now, but still invites herself over for lunch or dinner. allalanter­na.com

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