Imagine, a feast of fishes. With fried calamari, golden brown and crispy, sprinkled with lemon juice. With pink pulpy shrimps, and oysters, and crab cakes. With spaghetti and clams, rich red fish soup, and salted codfish, or salmon, or lobster, or whatever you want really. As long as it’s fish, and served in abundance on a festive table on Christmas Eve.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes is an Italian-American Christmas tradition. Using the words of Michael Di Giovine, who’s a professor of anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and has written a whole paper about it, the feast is a “four- to five-hour affair of eating, involving a highly standardized procession of multiple seafood-based courses and an equally ritualized method of consumption that is punctuated by only brief periods of repose.” Basically, in grand Italian style, you eat a lot and for a long time, without giving your stomach any rest.
The tradition has its roots in Southern Italy, where eating fish on Christmas Eve is common, for reasons both religious and practical – Christmas Eve is supposed to be a day of abstinence from meat for Catholics, and the south of Italy has a lot of sea full of fish around it. The symbolism of it, though hard to pin down for sure, has to do with the Bible. Fish signifies rebirth and fecundity, and the number seven is linked to a number of Catholic things, including the sacraments, the deadly sins, and the days of the week.
Taken to American shores by Italian immigrants in the 1800s and 1900s, the idea of a fishy Christmas Eve stayed, and the feast got bigger and more luscious as the immigrant families got richer.
“It’s one of the cultural markers that really differentiate us from non-Italian-Americans,” says Di Giovine. “And it’s something that has persisted even if we lose our Italian language abilities and connection with people who live in Italy. The food is one of the last things to go.” Di Giovine points out that the traditional recipes prepared during the feast – such as pasta with anchovies, fried salted codfish, eel, and scungilli, sea snails cooked and cut in small pieces – are not usually associated with Italian-American food. “Food is a marker of cultural identity,” he says. “It’s a very salient symbol of what culture you identify with. This type of meal is not associated with mainstream, Olive Garden Italian-American food. It’s seen as more authentic in its connection to the old world, and as something that, if you like it, shows your authenticity as an Italian.”
According to Di Giovine, the importance of the Feast of The Seven Fishes lays in the family gathering. “It’s about the family reinforcing their sense of unity after a year of maybe not being together,” he says. In that sense, it’s similar to Thanksgiving, “but the added extra of the Vigilia is that we are conscious of the fact that we are different from other Americans. We are reaffirming our ethnic identity.”
Michael Di Giovine has shared his family’s Feast of The Seven Fishes menu with us:
Antipasti: fried calamari with lemon or marinara sauce; puparoli imbuttinati, stuffed pickled peppers; shrimp cocktail; shrimp and polenta in red sauce, crab cakes.
Primi: pasta aglio e olio, with optional anchovy.
Secondi: fried salted codfish; fried codfish in a spicy tomato sauce; capitone, eel; scungili; stuffed escarole; fish salad with shrimp and raw calamari.
Dessert: collana del prete, “priest’s necklace”, as in string of roasted chestnuts; assorted nuts; clementines, dried figs; struffoli.
Does the Feast of the Seven Fishes tickle your curiosity? Here are three places where you can enjoy it in New York City.
1. The prestigious James Beard Foundation is hosting a sustainable Feast of the Seven Fishes every year. In 2019, Joey Baldino, owner of the restaurant Zeppoli, located in Collingswood, New Jersey, is cooking alongside Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, of Don Angie, in New York. “The Feast of the Seven Fishes really is an amazing night,” he said. “Mussels, spaghetti, baccalà, so many different smells. Anchovies, calamari, it goes on and on.” For the occasion, Joey decided to cook the recipes his family has been cooking for generations, since his grandparents arrived from Sicily and Calabria in 1916 (“If stuff is not broken, why mess with it”). It was the first time Baldino cooked a Feast of the Seven Fishes for someone who’s not his family and friends. “I don't usually offer it in my restaurant,” he explains. “I think it’s something sacred that should be a special moment with your family, and your aunts, and uncles, and cousins. It's not something that I want to capitalize on. It's something that I usually want to keep for myself, and share with my family.” But this year, he cooked it for the James Beard Foundation in support of its work in making American food diverse and sustainable for everyone. And, he says, it was a feast for sure.
Don Angie
2. Hillary Sterling is the chef at Vic’s, a neighborhood Italian restaurant in Noho. Despite knowing that the Feast of the Seven Fishes is more Italian-American than Italian, Sterling loves cooking Southern Italian food and takes advantage of the occasion to offer a fixed menu in the restaurant. “I do love cooking with southern influence,” she says. “The Seven Fishes focus is mostly in the South, so in the past I’ve mostly done menus inspired by Sicily and Sardinia. This year it's all inspired by Puglia.” Sterling says she loves the family dinner feeling that the tradition brings to the restaurant. “That's why I enjoy cooking it. It's a very elegant night in the restaurant and people want to be there,” she says. “We kind of force people to be a family that night you know by serving a family style first course.” Stars of the menu will be sea urchins with stracciatella, Sterling’s personal homage to the southern region of Puglia. “During my travels in Puglia, I was in a town called Trani,” she recounts. “I was wandering around on a Sunday morning and the only guys on the street were these father and son, who were just selling urchins for like one euro. Right there! They were like, ‘Do you want a sea urchin?’, and of course I want a sea urchin.”
Vic's
3. For a less traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes, Faro in Brooklyn offers an elevated menu of crab, caviar, shrimps, and scallops. “It’s a one-of-a-kind Feast of the Seven Fishes dinne,” says a spokesperson for the restaurant. “And it’s not your nonna's dinner, but an annual Faro tradition inspired by chef Kevin Adey’s own extended family tradition. Here’s the menu.
Faro