Feast of the Seven Fishes

Now that all the cookie recipes are in your hands and Thanksgiving is in the rear-view, it’s time to talk about the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

My friends and acquaintances have always asked about the Feast of the Seven Fishes and if it’s a tradition with me and my family. In practice, I say yes because of the food we serve on Christmas Eve, but honestly, we never referred to it by that name; it was just Christmas Eve dinner. Knowing that I wanted to write about it, I have been racking my brain back to my childhood for my earliest memories, and more honesty here, I don’t have any memories of a big feast on Christmas Eve beyond my teenage years.

On Christmas Eve when my siblings and I were little – probably until I was in 1st grade, you’d never know it was a holiday. Other than some cookies baked and some outside decorations, the house was bare. My parents would put us to bed early on Christmas Eve, and like magic with the help of our grandparents and aunt and uncle, the tree would go up and get decorated, the house would be decorated, the presents would appear, and sometime around 1 or 2 AM the grownups would – are you ready for this – wake us up to see ‘Santa’ and open one present each. I kid you not, then they’d put us back to bed until 6 or 7 AM when we started hounding them to get up. THEN my mother would host the entire family for Christmas dinner later in the day. If there was a Feast of Seven Fishes while the decorating was happening, I was not a party to it. While I don’t really remember, I’m guessing we kids ate mozzarella e carrozza, pasta fagioli or something meatless like that before bed.

SO where did this tradition originate?

Because I have no memory of referring to the feast on Christmas, I did some research to find out that no one really knows how it started, but it’s definitely Italian-American and not actually celebrated in the Mother Country. Further, although Catholics don’t eat meat on Christmas Eve, the feast is in no way associated with Catholicism. According to TastingTable , the, earliest written mention of the feast was in a 1987 NY Times article. That was long past even my teenage years… Anyway, there is some thinking that there was some tieback to southern Italy where seafood is a prominent part of the food culture -- at least according to a cabbie in the NYT article.

So, again, I digress, back to Christmas Eve; we were Roman Catholic on paper, we were not what I would call ‘practicing’. Even so we didn’t eat meat on Fridays or Christmas Eve of all the things, go figure….

Here’s what my family did for Christmas Eve as I recall from my teenage years. The menu included an antipasto, mozzarella e carrozza, shrimp cocktail, scungilli salad, calamari (either in marinara sauce or cold in a salad), baccalà (salted cod and not a favorite of mine), fried smelts (on my same list as baccalà), spaghetti with a seafood marinara sauce that included but was not limited to clams, tuna, anchovies, or mussels. I also feel like there were some kind of processed fish sticks and mac ‘n’ cheese for younger kids with less educated palates.

My new game is seeing how many fishes I can cram into one meal when my husband John and I are home alone on Christmas eve. It can be a challenge if you don’t want leftovers, and no one really wants leftover fish around. I managed 6 a couple of years ago.

Over the next couple of posts, I’ll share some other seafood recipes along with antipasto and mozzarella e carrozza. We already have a good start on some fish dishes with Blue Hill Bay Mussels, Salmon and Tuna Ceviche, and Marinara Sauce that will be the base for your pasta dish.

One other thing…. check out the Netflix movie (you guessed it) Feast of the Seven Fishes it’s an adorable teenage romcom set in the early 80s in Pittsburgh.

Out of all the ‘Italian American’ movie depictions about the culture, this is unequivocally the one that best portrayal of how my great aunts and uncles prepared for any family gathering (not necessarily the Feast of the 7 Fishes) when I was a child. It’s now my new almost favorite holiday flick behind ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and Jim Carrey’s ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’.