macerata
In the 1931 Italian Touring Club “Restaurant guide of Italy”
there is a quote which reads verbatim: “The Marche gave
rise to one of the classics of Italian cuisine, il brodetto, a fish
soup, for which the coastal towns of the central Marche
region are famous for and in particular some of them ...
“ And so it follows that in Porto Recanati, people “use fish
coated in flour, then they make a thick sauce and use wild
saffron (zafferanella) ...; they then add slices of toasted bre-
ad and a rich variety of fish which is necessary including
sea bass, small mullet, gray mullet, sole, flying gurnard,
etc with cobs, cuttlefish and squid which are cooked in a
sauté of onion, parsley, garlic, pepper and salt in olive oil.
At the end of the cooking time the whole is then poured
on bread slices placed in a bowl. The result is an amalga-
mation of flavors and aromas certainly vigorous, but still
delicate. In Porto Recanati the soup is also prepared and
put into tins for export. “
Currently, most of the restaurants in Porto Recanati conti-
nue to use this recipe believing that it is the “zafferanella”
(wild saffron) which is the ingredient that distinguishes the
“Portorecanatese” soup from all others, and this is the rea-
son why the recipe was cataloged in the 90s by the Acca-
demia del Brodetto founded in Porto Recanati:
Ingredients: Three pounds of seafood (squid, monkfish,
spider fish, cobs, hake, race, mullet, dogfish etc.), Two
onions, two glasses of extra virgin olive oil, two glasses of
dry white wine, five grams of wild saffron “zafferanella2
(Carthamus tintorius), stale bread, salt and pepper;
Direction:
Using a large saucepan with two handles, fry the finely
