We Wish You a Fishy Christmas
by Mary Leonard

It's difficult to concentrate one month before the 2008 election when all I can think about is whether the economic crisis will end before my pension disappears. When I get anxious my thoughts turn to food. I have been cooking up Italian lately... a great pesto last night. I think the secret is real Parmesan. But I wish my mother and sister were around to share cooking secrets. My husband is happy to eat anything—even what I call "airline meals": warmed up leftovers that are barely edible. He still says, this is great honey. He is just happy to be fed. Food is feed for the man from Iowa.

But I remember Sunday dinners in my Italian-American home when no adult rose from the table for hours and the kids ran around or played ping-pong or canasta. When we returned to the table, tired and cranky, the adults would be having one more espresso and picking at strufoli, a Sicilian dessert that consists of a mound of tiny fried dough balls sculpted into a honeyed mountain and covered with sprinkles. You reached in with a spoon and took a small serving, but it just sat there to be picked at, and so by the late afternoon it was like a rocky parking lot.

As a kid, I hated Italian food. What a waste of time to eat those soups with ceci beans and Swiss chard! Or how about braciole stuffed with breadcrumbs, raisins and pine nuts and simmered for hours in spaghetti sauce? Sounds good now, but then I spent most of the meal investigating all the unknown objects inside (Mom, Just give me a spoonful of spaghetti please!) And the visit to old aunts and uncles in Rhode Island—a nightmare. Everyone pinched my cheek and said, Mangia, mangia, piccina! (Eat, eat little child). I thought I was caught by the witches in Grimm's fairy tales. And who could possibly go near those sweet ricotta pies filled with all that disgusting fruit? And torrone—impossible candy with a coating of dried sugar that I thought was paper so I spent forever trying to peel it off and then abandoned the nougat candy in some lethal place like a great uncle's favorite velvet chair. If we were lucky, though, we would go to Aunt Lizzy's—the New England great aunt who married my Uncle Tony. Uncle Tony would barbecue and Aunt Lizzy would serve chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven.

Then, I was an American kid and did not want any connection with Italian cooking. Now, I search for recipes and restaurants that replicate memories of my childhood: I am a descendent of Italians and Proust.

The Vigilia is my way of making the nostalgia real at least one night a year. On Christmas Eve, the ritual is to serve seven different kinds of fish. This is superstitious of course-—my grandmother wore garlic around her neck and my mother would not go shopping without her amulets. The Vigilia was the Italian way of combining adherence to Catholic doctrine, superstition, and gluttony. Before Vatican II, Catholics were supposed to abstain from meat on Christmas Eve. But it was also the night for a family gathering, so why not serve seven different kinds of fish to honor the seven sacraments and make the church and family happy? My family keeps this tradition alive, even though none of us is a practicing Catholic.

We start the communication concerning the Vigilia in October. We have some staples: stuffed clams, not bought commercially, but with fresh chopped clams, lots of garlic, oregano, breadcrumbs and should I say it, butter— mixed with some good olive oil. And I don't add Parmesan! A second staple is Italian tuna served with roasted red peppers, capers and pignoli nuts. My husband picks around those little things, calling them rabbit turds. Except for my husband, we all love shellfish and have moved into lots of shellfish in recent years, subjecting my son to the dangerous job of opening the fresh oysters. One year he slit open his hand, which called for a frantic search for gauze and tape and overcooking the calamari! Another year, we tried gently to persuade the oysters to open with a brief spell in the microwave. They exploded. I will not describe.

Last year was our final attempt at oysters—we found tiny crabs crawling around the opened ones. Do you think this is typical, and that at the Oyster Bar in NYC, they flick the crabs away before serving? Oyster—I once did love thee.

We try to be traditional. Lobster or calamari in red sauce over pasta was the main course in my grandparents' day, but that became too heavy for us and so we argue over which Marcella Hazan recipe to try— the slow cooked squid and potatoes and tomatoes, or the sea bass baked with fresh fennel? For dessert, we bring out the Sicilian mountain of fried dough and stay at the table for hours, until it's time to open the gifts.

The Vigilia is difficult in this age of who-can't-eat-what and trying for the vegan dish and please no raw garlic and remembering who is allergic to dairy or nuts. I always try to invite some people who survived the Depression and a few wars—like friends from Woodstock in their 80s who when I ask what they can eat exclaim, "We eat everything!" My kids, now adults, love the process and the family arguments and collaboration. My daughter, married and living in Israel, flies home for Christmas. She tried the Vigilia in Tel Aviv cooking the seven fish, decorating some tropical plants with Russian ornaments her husband found in the souk but it was 75 and no one understood why so much food and what was the story about those sacraments and abstinence?

So now she comes home. She is the queen of rituals and finds all the right platters and starts decorating two weeks before. She loves detail and Italian food. When she was in fourth grade, she brought steamed artichokes for lunch while the other kids were eating ham sandwiches drowned in Thousand Island dressing. Her attention to detail, however, got her into trouble with the family. One year when I was working fulltime, I came across what seemed like a reasonable timesaving idea. The kids would alternate weeks making the school lunches. My daughter was in third grade and my son in sixth. I did not supervise. I was doing laundry or watching reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was my daughter's week. My son came home from school, yelling "where is she?" and threatening to beat her up.

"What happened?" I asked nonchalantly.

"I opened up my lunch and she had used a cookie cutter!"

"How cute," I said.

"No! My two baloney sandwiches were hearts!"

I knew my time saving plan was over. He was 12 and did not need baloney and white bread hearts for lunch. But Nicole was just being herself—creatively decorating. It was the end of the lunch plan, but the beginning of sibling food wars.

"I asked mom to buy the Ding Dongs and you can't put them in your lunch."

"The prosciutto and breadsticks are mine!"

When my daughter reached middle school and was into her no-fat diet and making the pasta sauce, her brother would sabotage it. Every time he walked by, he added some olive oil. At dinner, we would hear, "See, this isn't bad," and my son would snicker.

I guess it is good to have sibling warfare over food because now both kids know that food means love. Yes, I have become my mother. However, both kids love to cook and are food snobs in a good way, or so I think. "You made this lasagna with bottled sauce?" my son asks. And that Midwestern husband has made considerable progress, eating more vegetables than ever: celeriac, kohlrabi, and fennel. And just recently, I made spaghetti al sugo di pesce, spaghetti with fish-head sauce, and he just smiled and said, "This is great honey!"