TODAY, as
households are becoming more ethnically and religiously diverse, partaking in
holiday traditions can fulfill a need for a collective gathering as well as a
religious ritual. During these tough economic times, as families cut corners
and scale back on gift giving, holiday meals provide both a communal thanks and
a connection to ancestral pasts....
For
Italian-Americans, it is re-creating the feast of the seven fishes and sharing
it with family and friends, a multiday enterprise that forces us to take time
off from our normal routines and reflect upon the start of the winter solstice.
A few weeks
before Christmas some years back, my Aunt Natalie broke her hip. Despite her
advanced age (she will turn 89 this month) and her discomfort, she was
determined to continue the family tradition of an all-fish dinner on Christmas
Eve.
Needing to use a
walker, my aunt had trouble moving around the kitchen, reaching into cabinets
and pulling out drawers. Yet she remained undaunted. She used some string to
attach the necessary utensils to each side of her walker, enabling her to sauti eel on one burner and stir the Italian staple of
salted cod, or baccal`, in tomato sauce on another.
This week, my 87-year-old
mother plans to clean squid, fry small silvery smelts, and stuff sweet pickled
peppers with pine nuts, raisins and anchovies for the Christmas Eve dinner.
Italian-Americans
of all generations reach back to their heritage, and their cookbooks, as guides
to preparing the feast of the seven fishes. The significance of seven
types of fish has yielded numerous theories, including a correspondence to the number
of sacraments in the church, the seven days of creation, the seven
virtues of Christian theology, and a reminder of the seven deadly sins.
Families have their own interpretations, perhaps based on the region from which
their ancestors came; and the number of dishes prepared can vary widely from 3, representing the number of wise
men, to 13, signifying Jesus and the apostles.
My family never
ate the traditional seven my mother
mainly cooked baccal`, squid, smelts and sometimes scungilli or conch. I doubt there was any particular
significance to the number we chose; it probably said more about the limits of
my moms stamina and the family aversion to eel and shellfish.
This season, with
the economy foremost on everyones mind, those who have continually
lamented the commercialization of the holidays may for once find their gripes
heard. Elaborate gift giving feels as out of sync as Santa sunning in
A traditional
meal that unwraps course by course may not satisfy the childrens need for
piles of boxes and ribbons, but it can help satiate the deeper longings of
adults. And todays children unlike the girl I once was exposed early on to multicultural
dishes, may appreciate the exoticism of ethnic feasts. I never told my friends
about our Christmas Eve banquet, fearing that the words squid and scungilli would send them away squealing.
In fact, in the
past several decades, I have found it ironic that the Italian peasant
traditions upon which I was raised
and which I desperately wanted to escape have become chic. Learning, for example,
that my maternal and paternal grandfathers, both of whom had died before I was
born, pressed grapes in their
Back in the 70s
(to add to the layers of my ethnic shame), Italian-American culture was defined
by Francis Ford Coppolas The
Godfather, long before Mr. Coppola began roaming his extensive Napa
vineyards and bottling his own brand of wine.
But even the
Today, the excess
of flying to
Or
the whole fish.
The salty baccal`, the slithering squid, the flaky
smelts those aromas will always
crack open the door to all those Christmases past.
* * * * *
Maria Laurinos new memoir, Old World Daughter, New
World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom,
will be published in April.