Caldo de Peixe (Cape Verdean Fish Soup)
Caldo de peixe is the Cape Verdean fish soup: white and sweet potatoes cooked with onions, peppers and tomatoes, with fish added towards the end. It is winter food on the islands and it is built entirely around what an Atlantic archipelago has to hand. Cape Verde sits several hundred miles off the coast of Senegal, and its cooking reflects that position exactly, Portuguese in structure and vocabulary, West African in ingredients, and shaped throughout by the fact that fish is abundant and almost everything else has to be grown on volcanic islands with limited rainfall. Sweet potato alongside white potato in the same pot is a very Cape Verdean move, and it gives the broth a background sweetness that plain potato would not. The soup is deliberately unfussy. There is no stock, no wine and very little seasoning beyond the vegetables themselves: the broth is made by the fish and the potatoes as they cook. That is characteristic of island cooking generally, and it means the quality of the fish matters more here than in a heavily seasoned soup. This recipe came into the archive through the Smithsonian's 1995 Festival of American Folklife cookbook, to which Cape Verdean Americans contributed recipes as part of preserving their heritage. That provenance is worth recording.
Cape Verde1 hr 5 minNympha