Despite the word "cacciucco" might make someone a little wary, even the most curious gourmets, we would like to assure you that for fish lovers it is something not be missed. A sea food soup enriched with roasted bread which will make the most demanding palates exult. The word cacciucco comes from the Turkish "kuzuk" which means little, minute things: in fact the caciucco is a soup that has as its basic ingredient very small fish.

Also this traditional dish, as many others, finds its origin in poor people’s cuisine, and despite variations brought to the recipe by restaurant chefs to make it a qualitatively better dish, the basic ingredients are all fish of the sort we could consider “of little value”. The origins of this dish date back to the five hundreds when, to feed the rowers on chains in the jails, a soup was given them that was very similar, in the historical descriptions, to the cacciucco.

Basic ingredients are cuttlefish, polyps, smooth hound, to wish the “soup fish” is added: (rock fish, swallow-fish and gurnard), sea food, shrimps and prawns. All of this is given taste with tomatoes, white wine, garlic, sage and chilli pepper.
And to conclude the works, it is served with a base of roasted Tuscan bread, savoured before hand with garlic and pepper, upon which the fish is placed and the sauce that was formed during cooking. Cacciucco, as the Livornese food tradition would have it, is better matched with red wines that can handle the strong taste of the soup