Like many peasant dishes, this velvety, brothy soup is an enormously comforting and warming dish. It’s like a fisherman’s version of pastina in brodo, which is usually made with homemade chicken or beef stock, a sort of Italian chicken noodle soup. The secret behind its wonderful flavour is the use of a variety of whole, small fish – the kind you find in piles at the markets labelled pesce da zuppa, or ‘fish for soup’.
In her classic book Honey from a Weed (1986), Patience Gray describes a similar dish Zuppa di pesciolini di scoglio (‘soup of little rockfish’) from Puglia’s Salento, where she questions whether it is ‘infanticide’ to eat such tiny, immature fish: ‘If left in the sea would they grow up?’ Indeed, it’s probably hard to find these little fish outside Italy so you can use a mixture of their adult-sized versions – the only downside to this is that you won’t be able to get as much variety for this quantity (unless you are prepared to make enough for 12 portions!).
The small versions of these fish can be rather fiddly to clean and prepare, but the benefit of this recipe is that you don’t need to fiddle so much as the food mill does all that work. If you don’t have a food mill (a passaverdura or passatutto in Italian, or a mouli as some call it), I suggest getting one. You won’t regret it! It’ll be your best friend for every sauce, purée, jam or mash that you want to make. What makes it different from, say, a blender, is that it actually separates the things you want and those you don’t want. The fish bones and head and skin? Those get filtered out through this remarkable contraption, so you’re only left with all the juicy, flavourful goodness.