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Even in a country like ours that has few enduring traditions, Christmas seems a time when we all reenact the family rituals that make this holiday special, whether it’s a trip to the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s (yes, I know, it’s now technically Macy’s) or a Christmas Eve service at the church we otherwise may rarely visit.
The Tomte is actually a Swedish tradition, similar to the Norwegian Nissa, a kind of family spirit that must be given porridge every Christmas Eve. According to legend, if you don’t give this mischievous sprite a bowl of porridge, he will destroy your crops. Our Tomte is benign: he just pranks, like putting cans of peas in my daughter’s purses, hiding miniature Tiki gods in a pair of boots, and otherwise messing with all members of our family (except, oddly, me).
This year our grandson came back to visit, so it seemed incumbent upon us to institute yet another tradition. On Christmas Eve, we’re planning to prepare the Feast of the Seven Fishes. For those who’ve never had this meal (and this will be my first such feast), it’s exactly as the name implies: a dinner that includes seven types of fish or seafood.
It seems acceptable to have almost any kind of fish, though there are some that are clearly expected to be a part of the meal, and they are:
- Salted cod, also called baccala, which is sold in large fillets, salted, as has been done for centuries, to preserve the fish. Our source for this fish is Caputo’s Cheese Market, which is a centuries old preservation technique that has the very acceptable collateral benefit of concentrating the flavor of the fish.
- Eel, which is a tougher seafood to locate, though I was able to order a full eel, smoked, from Hagan’s on Montrose [http://www.hagensfishmarket.com/], a place I’ve been going since I was a kid. Hagan’s is a wonderful source for many types of smoked fish – I’ll probably pick up some smoked trout too.
- Crustacean of some sort, and in our case, it’s going to be King Crab because that’s what Carolyn always wants for her birthday (which falls on December 24), and this traditional feast seems somewhat flexible on the details. This looseness with the details may have something to do with this feast’s origins.
The roots of this culinary tradition are surprisingly obscure. It seems the traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes may have come from Southern Italy (where seafood is somewhat more abundant than up north), but it’s also been theorized that it’s actually an Italian-American innovation, kind of like Italian Beef, spaghetti loaded down with red sauce, and pizza with cheese an inch thick.
The American tendency to over-do ever thing makes me suspect that this feast may, in deed, be an Italian-American invention rather than an strictly European Italian tradition. It seems likely that people in the relatively impoverished southern portion of Italy might have a hard time affording seven different types of fish on Christmas Eve.
In true over-the-top American fashion, the Feast of the Seven Fishes has evolved in some areas to be the Feast of the Thirteen Fishes (symbolizing Jesus and the twelve apostles) because here, in the Land of the Free to Eat However Much We Want,” more is better.
At our home, though, we’re sticking with seven fishes, which in our case may symbolize the Seven Deadly Sins, the one of which we most regularly commit being, of course, gluttony. It’s traditional.
