Holiday Italian Feast of 7 Fishes with Snapper Octopus and Pastabhofack2/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
“Ma, why are you doing the seven fishes thing?” Carmy Berzatto asks his mother, Donna, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, on the “Fishes” episode of the most recent season of The Bear.
“It’s tradition,” she replies, her long red-taloned hands visibly coated in garlic butter as she wildly brandishes a glass of red wine.
A row of lemon-stuffed branzinos is jammed into the oven, lobsters are torn in half, oysters Rockefeller are baked, and, also, sauce is splattered across the ceiling, artichokes are dropped, cigarettes are lit and timers buzz relentlessly.
That the episode clocked in as the longest one of the season (at more than an hour) makes sense to anyone who has ever experienced the herculean task of cooking this meal.
In my family, the feast of the seven fishes began in the 1970s. My father is from Vicenza, and my mother is from Calabria, and they met and married in Boston, and neither of them grew up eating a feast of fish on Christmas Eve. In northern Italy, it was unheard of, even in Venice, a city 70 kilometres away from Vicenza that’s known for its copious daily catch. And while seafood (particularly baccala, or salted cod) was consumed for the occasion in Calabria in southern Italy, there was no “feast of seven fishes.”
For both of them, the ritual started in the U.S. What my parents were intimately familiar with, being raised in Catholic households (in fact, my father spent a decade pursuing priesthood), was the notion of abstaining from meat for religious reasons; in Italy, my dad shared with me, the practice is known as digiuno, which means “to fast.”
Karima Moyer-Nocchi, a culinary historian at the University of Siena and the author of Chewing the Fat, explains: “The fish feast is at least symbolically a kind of fast. The practice of meatlessness was intended as an act of mortification of the flesh to recall the suffering of Christ.” Though a feast of this magnitude could hardly be considered suffering.
The ritual of the feast originated among Italian communities in the U.S. with the notion of abstaining from meat for religious reasons. The number seven shows up frequently in Christian and Jewish history, including the sacraments, the virtues, the days of creation and even the hills in Rome.OSTERIA GIULIA/Handout
The significance of seven has, like the feast itself, no specific roots, but the number shows up frequently in Christian and Jewish history: The sacraments, the virtues, the days of creation, even the hills of Rome have been mentioned. Though as Katie Parla, author of Food of the Italian Islands, points out, that one feels especially far-fetched. “Rome is called the city of seven hills but there are far more than that,” says Parla, who thinks instead the chosen number comes down to its lucky association. “Italians are very into numerology and superstitious things.”
Many believe that the practice of eating fish in supersized and multiple proportions during the holidays originated with the wave of Italian immigrants to the U.S. starting in the early 1900s. “When they came to America with all this abundance, everything became bigger and more exaggerated,” says Michael A. Di Giovine, a professor of anthropology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and author of Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage. As Italians in the fifties and sixties became more acculturated to all things American, it became that much more important to hold onto any connection to their Italian identity; often language and religion were lost over the years, but food culture endured.
The practice of the feast of the seven fishes is what anthropologists like Di Giovine refer to as a rite of intensification. “These are rituals that renew and refresh the social order after periods of alienation,” he explains. “The feast is a way of not just showing what your social group is, what your Italian-American identity is, but the ritual is a model of a culture for the next generation.” It’s proudly branded as Italian-American, a group whose traditions, says Moyer-Nocchi, are often considered inferior to “real” Italian practices.
But by creating the feast of the seven fishes, Italian-Americans, says Moyer-Nocchi, are interpreting the centuries-long practice of eating fish their own way. “This is communion,” she adds.
As far as must-haves, the feast does possess a hallmark dish. “Baccala is one universal element that’s present on every menu,” says Parla.
In the traditional preparation, where the cod is pureed with potato and garlic, quality olive oil is key, says Frank Castronovo, chef and co-owner of the Frankies Spuntino Group with locations in Brooklyn and Nashville.
Chef Robert Rossi of Toronto’s Osteria Giulia and Giulietta likes to serve it as croquettes. Vito Ciocca, an owner at Montreal’s Mano Cornuto, makes fritters.
Or, says Missy Robbins, chef and owner of Brooklyn’s Lilia, Misi and Misipasta, you can take a more modern tact: She calls her approach, whereby she salts and cures the cod herself then poaches it in olive oil, “baccala light.”
Baccala may be emblematic of the feast, but what other fishes make the cut stems more from personal preference and can shift, depending on taste and availability. “These rituals are all always changing over time,” adds Di Giovine, who says escarole baked with anchovies is a favourite in his household.
Robbins always does a duo of pastas and a whole roasted fish (specifically, tagliolini with crab, lemon and butter; linguine with clams; and a salt-crusted black bass), and Ciocca says skate fried in butter is a must, along with half lobsters seasoned and roasted with ketchup Lay’s chips and breadcrumbs – “It’s a beloved family hack,” he adds.
When Giulia offers the feast to its customers, octopus (cooked, chilled, then tossed in a salad with potatoes, celery and black olives in a red wine vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil and oregano dressing) is always on the menu, says Rossi. Eel, fried calamari and pasta with lobster sauce were always present in my family’s feast, and Castronovo remembers linguini with a seafood tomato sauce and scungilli – ”the only day of the year you’d eat snails.”
The TV show The Bear features an episode that includes a Feast of 7 Fishes. Jeremy Allen White as Carmen Berzatto in The Bear, season 2, episode 6, which is titled Fishes.Chuck Hodes/Handout
Parla, who grew up feasting with her Italian-American family in New Jersey, has created her own version now that she lives in Rome. “I start with fish carpaccio and raw shellfish, then do an octopus salad, shrimp with salsa rosa (basically ketchup and mayo, an Italian classic, if you can believe it), marinated anchovies, and fried calamari and cod, then finally spaghetti with clams and bottarga, stuffed calamari, salted cod with pine nuts and raisins, and eel,” says Parla, rattling off, it should be pointed out, 10 dishes total. “It’s a lot!”
One shortcut she recommends is opting for fishes that require zero heavy lifting, such as smoked salmon or anchovies, and that can easily be served with butter and toast. Or, she adds, throw a few fishes into one dish: a great spaghetti allo scoglio can include clams, mussels, calamari and shrimp.
Castronovo suggests foregoing the multiple courses. “Follow the more familial, loose and convenient path of serving everything in one go, buffet style,” he says. “Growing up, I loved the rhythm of the day: You’d get to a relative’s home at 3 and stay until 1 in the morning. The food would be laid out and you would serve yourself multiple times throughout the course of the visit, playing cards, drinking and telling stories in between.”
When The Bear’s Stevie (played by John Mulaney, a Berzatto via his relationship with cousin Michelle) is asked to say grace, he reflects on the “why” of the feast. He says, in part: “It’s a chance to be together and to take care of each other and to eat together… and there’s seven fishes which … takes a lot of time. And I think spending that time and using that time on the people that we love is how we show them that we love them.”
So, Robbins’s best advice: “Do what you can ahead of time so you can enjoy spending more time with your friends and family. Isn’t that what the feast is all about?”
Because yes, while the food is central to this celebration, even more so is the company.