EVERY FEW YEARS, I WRITE OF THE CHRISTMAS EVE ITALIAN SEVEN FISH MEAL. A SLIGHT VARIATION EACH YEAR. THIS IS THE LATEST. ONLY ONE YEAR OLD. PUBLISHED LAST YEAR ON DECEMBER 3. ENJOY!

I am of Italian extraction. My mother was born in Italy, my father of parents who immigrated from Italy. The seven fish meal Christmas Eve is an Italian-American tradition. From my perspective, the best meal of the year! No comparison!

I write about it today, Christmas Eve 2024. The meal preparation began three weeks ago for the meal this evening. A meal that fed 25-30 people.

One of the seven dishes is baccala. Baccala is cod fish. That dry hard salted piece of fish. It needs to be softened and made tasty for the Christmas Eve feast.

My former wife made the very best seven fish meal. Must give her credit. Her work three weeks early. She would cut the cod fish into small pieces and place it in a large bowl buried in olive oil, salt, pepper, parsley, and other herbs. Cover the bowl and place it on top of the refrigerator, not in it. Every day for the next three weeks she would take the bowl down, mix the contents and add whatever she thought was required. At the end of 3 weeks and on Christmas Eve, the bacccala would melt in your mouth.

Baked clams were another fish dish. We would enjoy them in a two hour cocktail fest prior to dinner. Together with shrimp. Shrimp two ways. One cold as in shrimp cocktail. The other battered in bread crumbs and eggs and fried in oil.

The shrimp was a substitute for mussels. I never saw a mussel till I began traveling to Florida. I doubt they even could be purchased in Utica back then.

Smelts another fish dish. Smelts fried in oil till crisp. The whole piece, head included, then eaten. Smelts were tiny and thin. About the size of a person’s little finger but thinner. I loved smelts! One of my absolute favorites!

Scungilli. The Italian way of saying snails.

Calamari. Like you wouldn’t believe. My wife would buy the tentacles already cleaned. Being fastidious, she would reclean each piece. She would stuff them with bread crumbs and egg and what have you. Sew each end with needle and thread. Cook them first by boiling. Then place them in a red meat sauce to further cook. Finally, the contents poured over a huge dish of macaroni. Pasta a term never heard back then in an Italian house. The stuffed calamari was to die for!

The final and seventh dish were lobster tails. Maine lobster tails. Big ones. Boiled and then broiled. Served covered with heaping portions of melted butter.

Desert consisted of Italian cookies which my wife started baking about the same time as she began preparing the baccala. She refrigerated them till Christmas Eve.

The meal took a good 5-6 hours to consume from cocktail hour through dessert. Everything slow and leisurely. Family time. Much laughter and recollections of earlier days in all our lives. Recollections especially of parents and relatives dead.

A meal to remember! I have not enjoyed one since 2006. Hopefully will enjoy one more before I pass on.

Enjoy your Christmas Eve! And have a very Merry Christmas holiday!

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]