BY JULIA DI MARCELLO

It’s Christmas Eve! If you can’t tell by the title, today’s menu for many Italian-American households consists of fish. Christmas Eve is considered a fasting day. In essence, it’s a day without meat until the feast of Christmas Day itself. This celebration, also known as the Vigilia di Natale, pays honor to the midnight birth of the baby Jesus. This way of eating stems way back from the Roman Catholic tradition of not eating meat the day before a feast day. Catholics would eat fish in replacement of meat the day before the holiday.

The Feast of Seven Fishes is a huge celebration and even more preferred by many people instead of Christmas Day. All due to the loads of seafood. This type of celebration was brought to New York City by Southern Italian immigrants in the late 1800s. Ever since then, it grew across NYC and grew throughout the Italian families in the United States.

Although it is unclear as to how and why specifically ‘seven fishes’ evolved, Italians usually eat more than seven types of seafood on Christmas Eve. Not strictly seven.Theories suggest the idea of ‘seven fishes’ come from the idea of the seven holy sacraments. A well-known and popular dish on this evening is baccalà, or further known as salted cold fish. Baccalà further reflects the customs from southern regions in Italy. 

The menu on Christmas Eve consists of pasta, vegetables, baked goods, and lots of red wine. You can’t go wrong with red wine while eating seafood. Besides baccalà, other popular seafood dishes include clams casino, fried calamari, fried shrimp, fried scallops, and fried smelts. We can’t forget one of my favorites, insalata di mare, which is a delicious seafood salad. 

My family also cooks linguine with red crab sauce. My grandmother always cooks up stuffed lobster tails and stuffed baked clams. Other families may also prepare oyster shooters, marinated or fried eel, shrimp cocktail, stuffed calamari, or even their favorite kind of pasta. 

No matter how you and your family celebrate Christmas Eve, we hope you enjoy the meals you cook up. Enjoy this holiday safely, and we will chat with you soon as we get closer to the new year. 

Buon Natale & Happy Holidays from Tony and the rest of the MBT team!