Every year, many people in the US celebrate their Italian heritage with a Christmas Eve tradition known as the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Our family is no exception, and, as Christmas Eve upon us, I am working diligently to prepare our Christmas Eve feast.
The origin of this tradition can be traced back to my mother’s family’s roots in San Fele, a town and comune in the province of Potenza in the Basilicata region of southern Italy. This area is surrounded by a beautiful coastline where seafood has been a major part of the population’s diet for generations.
According to my research, this tradition dates bac from the days when Roman Catholics abstained from eating meat on certain holidays, including Christmas. The number seven is connected to many different Catholic symbols, such as the seven sacraments and the seven deadly sins.
Although the tradition existed for hundreds of years in Italy, it did not emerge in the United States until the early 1900s as more and more Italians immigrated to America at the end of the 19th century.
My grandfather was one of those immigrants who landed in New York in the late 1800s and settled in Trenton, NJ shortly after arriving in this Country. He married my grandmother, Katherine Fracella, and raised his family in the Chambersburg section of Trenton.
My parents moved to Florida when I was two years old, but we would spend the summers in New Jersey, so I never lost the Italian connection. We have been celebrating this tradition “Florida Style” for at least thirty years.
Steeped in tradition, this Christmas Eve meal is the centerpiece of the holiday season for our family. The menu has changed over the years as we have tried to adhere to our heritage but also try different dishes that were not part of my childhood memories.
Perhaps that is what makes this tradition so much fun. If you ask seven Italian American cooks what they serve for this feast, chances are you would get seven different answers. Mainly, the Feast of the Seven Fishes is about tradition. I can’t remember ever eating eel or mussels, but we have served clams, oysters, snails, and scallops on occasion.
The main dish, however, has remained constant: crabs and spaghetti. For many years, we were wedded to the blue crabs like we would have on the Jersey shore. In Florida, blue crabs are not always as easy to find depending on the weather and the motivation of those catching the crabs. Stone crabs have worked well as a substitute for the blue crabs, but we still like to have a few blues in the sauce for flavor.
This year, for the first time, we are giving up smelts. Smelts are small fish that we would bread and fry until they were really crisp. The past couple of years, the smelts were not as good as usual, so this year we are going to substitute lobster and grouper bites for the smelts.
So, here is the menu for the Feast of the Seven Fishes at our house this year:
Stuffed Mushrooms (no fish)
Scallops
Lobster and Grouper Bites
Shrimp
Tuna
Anchovies
Stone Crabs
Blue Crabs
Have a wonderful holiday.
