A Christmas tradition more fish than fowl
Turkey. Stuffing. Mashed Potatoes. Gravy. Those are the foods typically associated with Christmas. But for me, Christmas means smelts, shrimps, scallops and scampi.
Ever since I can remember, my family and I have been eating fish and seafood on Christmas Eve. It’s an Italian tradition that goes way back. To be perfectly honest, however, I’m not quite sure where that tradition comes from. Maybe my parents explained it to me as a child and I simply forgot.
I called my dad to find out. “I have no idea,” he told me. “Maybe because we like fish?” Not exactly the answer I was expecting.
Next I tried my sister Marisa, who offered this: “Because it was Jesus’s favourite food?” Could be, but not the likely reason.
“I’m sure it has something to do with the Bible,” said my sister Ingrid. Now, we were getting somewhere.
In desperation, I emailed my cousin Orlando in Rome. “People tend to spend more money at Christmas and fish is expensive,” he proffered. That definitely didn’t sound right.
Wikepedia turned up a much more plausible explanation. Turns out the long tradition of eating fish and seafood on Christmas Eve dates from the Roman Catholic tradition of abstinence, which dictated that Christians refrain from eating meat or milk products on the eve of specific holy days.
Known as “La Vigilia,” the Italian Christmas Eve meal can vary depending on which region of Italy you come from, but the one thing that does not vary is that every course consists of fish.
Known as the Feast of the Seven Fishes, the meal typically features seven courses.
In our house, we pared it down to five. We’d start with a platter of tempura battered fried calamari, shrimps, and my all-time favourite: smelts. This was followed by
baccala (or cod) in a tomato sauce and my dad’s favourite, roasted eel — the one dish that my sisters and I absolutely refused to touch.
That’s because my mom used to bring these snake-like creatures home alive from the fish monger and then l eave them slithering in the kitchen sink until it was time to butcher them. She would then empty the sink of water and douse the eels in flour (this makes them less slippery).
Firmly gripping each one in her hand, and completely unfazed, she would neatly sever their heads with kitchen scissors and then unceremoniously dump them back in the sink where they would writhe in their own blood as my sisters and I watched wide- eyed and terrified. Not surprisingly, this raised the “eeew” factor through the stratosphere and no amount of entreaties would entice us to taste the eels.
The next course was coquilles St. Jacques followed by our absolute favourite: the pasta course. Being Italian, that meant three different types of pasta: seafood pasta with shrimps and scallops;
pasta d’acciughe (spaghetti with anchovies), and our very favourite, pasta ammudicata (pasta with bread crumbs). While the latter is not a fish course, it is a specialty from mom’s region of Campobasso, in the south of Italy.
This dish was a real treat for us kids because it was the one time we were allowed to eat with our hands. The traditional way to eat pasta ammudicata is to roll the spaghetti noodles around your fingers and stuff them into your mouth. It’s messy and a whole lot of fun for a kid!
Once we had our fill of pasta, we went on to the last and most impressive course of all: a platter of butterflied scampi broiled with butter and bread crumbs and served with lemon and melted garlic butter for dipping.
This dish broke the bank in our cash-strapped home; it was an absolutely scrumptious extravagance for my struggling parents — and one that we kids looked forward to all year.
Hey, maybe cousin Orlando in Rome was right after all!