Angelo and His Big Fish Feast
This column originally ran December 13, 2007, in the column "Ravenous" in the Woodstock Times, the Saugerties Times and the Kingston Times, etc.
The best cook I’ve ever known was as bitter as he was sweet, with a cantankerousness that matched the goodness of his heart. My Tuscan-born father-in-law Angelo was a magnificent cook and unforgettable man. When I married his son, the first Christmas Eve I spent with the family was so different from my own experience that it didn’t even feel like Christmas. It was so unlike the low-key WASP-y eggnog-and-carols country Christmas Eves of my own childhood. But at the Brizzis’ tenth-floor apartment in midtown Manhattan, at around 9 p.m. Christmas Eve twenty or thirty boisterous people showed up for Angelo’s grand seafood extravaganza. Angelo cooked his Christmas Eve seafood dinner in deference to his Sicilian wife Maria and her sister Grace who lived with them, as a Christmas Eve fish feast is more southern Italian than Tuscan. He cooked most of it in a kitchen the size of a station wagon (there was another kitchen, even smaller, a few yards away, for overflow), and the feast was followed by opening presents at midnight, with Christmas Day itself merely a calm denouement.
The meal often began with a rich linguine with white clam sauce, followed by lemony squid and octopus salads, a whole poached salmon with an herby sauce, sole francese, salt cod baked in tomatoes (Grace’s contribution) and the perennial favorite: pounds upon pounds of butterflied jumbo shrimp francese soaked in tangy lemon sauce. Side dishes included an elaborate salad, gratinéed fennel, slow-roasted potatoes and carrots with Grand Marnier. There were red and white wines in abundance and always too many desserts, brought by guests: ice cream, tarts, my mocha pecan pie and my sister-in-law Terry’s assortment of cheesecakes and pound cakes.
During the long, loud, joyful meal, Angelo sat at the head of the table, letting loose an unstoppable stream of raunchy jokes and innuendos with ribald glee, shocking the urbane Maria, all in his thick Italian accent (I often understood him better when he spoke Italian). Handsome Angelo, his hair dyed red-brown until late in life, managed to carry off a unique mix of earthy and elegant. He had once lived in Greenwich Village, an actor in the Italian theater. And there was a theatrical air at the Brizzis’ holiday tables, between Angelo’s entertaining personality and that of the actors and costume designers that Maria and Grace knew through their theatrical costume shop, often guests at holiday meals.
Generous to a fault, Angelo once literally wrestled his cousin to the ground over a restaurant bill, she a sophisticated Tuscan furrier much younger than him. Sentimental Angelo was as generous with his fierce hugs as he was with the food on the groaning boards he laid out. When my husband and I arrived for a visit he always squeezed me in a big hug and thanked me tearfully for “bringing” his son to see him.
But sometimes Angelo would tease or goad his wife or sons mercilessly just to spark things up a bit, or he would pick a fight at the breakfast table and then storm off and pout all day. His favorite things to do besides cooking were reading, listening to opera (Madam Butterfly made him cry), watching soccer (made him yell), or Benny Hill (to laugh).
Angelo’s stomach was too delicate and ulcer-ridden to eat foods like the salamis and beans he loved best; he could drink only room temperature liquids and eat only small amounts of the blandest food. But he enjoyed the vicarious pleasure of watching his loved ones enjoy eating and he spoiled us for life by packing goodies for us to take home after our visits, like huge slabs of smoked salmon or tubs of lobster chunks from the Palm restaurant where he worked as a waiter. He knew where to get the creamiest Pecorino Toscano, the winiest olives, and exotic melons at their peak of perfection to wrap with the sweetest, thinnest prosciutto in New York.
He roasted and marinated red and yellow peppers and stewed tripe just for us to snack on. He slathered decadent Tuscan chicken liver pate on crispy crostini for elegant dinners. Once he learned that I loved to cook, he would buy me ingredients like giant artichokes, portabello mushrooms, legs of baby lamb or filets mignon with a can of green peppercorns for the sauce.
Before I knew better I would try to help him in the kitchen, but he was critical and my efforts invariably fell short. Eventually I learned, like the rest of the family had, to stay out of his way in the kitchen.
* * *
Italian-American Christmas traditions have their roots in the diverse regions of Italy, but the “Feast of the Seven Fishes” is a mostly American development, known only in a few tiny pockets of southern Italy. For Italian Catholics, the day before Christmas, La Vigilia, is a sacred fast day such as Good Friday, on which no meat can be eaten, although in modern times in Italy many no longer follow the rule. Like a lot of other immigrant traditions, the big fish feast has all but disappeared back in the old country. Angelo’s fellow Tuscans who still live in Italy have no traditional Christmas Eve meal nor any restrictions against eating meat.
Traditional dishes for the Italian-American cenone usually include salt cod (baccalá) and smelts, both of which have fallen by the wayside over the years due to undeserved dips in popularity. If it weren’t for Grace, salt cod would have not been part of the Brizzi cenone. I would have missed it, a tasty Sicilian dish of fish with tomato, onion, dark and golden raisins and green and black olives. Angelo never served fried smelts, since he and Maria never liked any kind of oily fish. A fine fat eel (capitone) is traditional, too, promising coming renewal and happiness, but it never had a place on their table either.
Second and third generation Italian-Americans and chefs alike have gotten wild and wooly with their own interpretations of the classics. So on Italian-American Christmas Eve tables you’ll find stuffed clams, seafood crepes, swordfish with orange sauce or with capers and vinegar, mussels oreganato, fried oysters, stuffed squid, scallops, whiting, flounder, grilled halibut, lobster fra diavolo or in ravioli with vodka sauce, sole stuffed with crab and shrimp, homemade pasta with lobster sauce and squid meatballs, lobster bisque, codfish fritters, salt cod salad, grilled tuna with capers, shrimp scampi, smoked salmon, trout or bluefish, roasted sea bass, lasagna, cuttlefish or sea urchins.
Boston Chef Marc Orfaly has offered a calamari confit with braised romaine, currants and walnut foam. At Grotto in the same city you can celebrate Christmas eve with a dish of pan-roasted jumbo diver scallop, wild mushroom risotto, truffle-basted cod and fresh shaved Alba white truffles.
Or just have the traditional feast of the one fish and call out for pizza with anchovies.
You gotta have some vegetables, too, and you might find cauliflower, likely fried, or string beans, marinated artichoke hearts, sweet bell peppers roasted or stuffed, stuffed artichokes or eggplant alla parmigiana or in cold pickled caponata.
Then wash it all down with plenty of strong coffee, digestive liqueurs like Sambuca or Fernet Branca, with some ricotta pie, fig cookies, almond biscotti, torrone (nougat), fruit-studded panettone, dense panforte di Siena or just dried figs and dates with nuts.
* * *
The last Christmas Eve dinner Angelo cooked was at the end of 2000, and his son Albert’s wife Kristin did much of it, while once energetic Angelo sat and smiled weakly through his pain. Two months later he would be dead, of kidney cancer, his first two grandchildren on the way. He would never cook another meal. He left a lot of Christmas Eve regulars missing his feasts, and missing him: funny, silly, loving Angelo. I know I do.
On Christmas Eve these days I know I can’t fill his shoes, but I make seafood dinners, sometimes pasta with crabmeat, always lemony seafood salad, Sicilian salt cod and that heavenly butterflied shrimp francese—he was mostly stingy about giving out his recipes, until the cancer came and he gave me the shrimp one and a few others. When I make Christmas Eve dinner I want to channel his generosity of spirit and his wondrous capability to crank out quantities of marvelous food, hoping that the grandchildren he never knew will in some indirect way know him. But most days I just want him back for a day, to give us a hug and a meal like no one else can.
How many fishes?
Why does the Feast of the Seven Fishes have to have seven kinds of fish? Or is it thirteen? On Christmas Eve I always do an odd number, three if it’s just us, or seven for a big crowd, but some cooks swear by nine, ten, eleven or even 25. Here are a variety of explanations I’ve run across for what the numbers stand for. So cook as much fish as you want to, and take your pick.
3:
7:
9:
10:
11:
12:
13:
25:
The best cook I’ve ever known was as bitter as he was sweet, with a cantankerousness that matched the goodness of his heart. My Tuscan-born father-in-law Angelo was a magnificent cook and unforgettable man. When I married his son, the first Christmas Eve I spent with the family was so different from my own experience that it didn’t even feel like Christmas. It was so unlike the low-key WASP-y eggnog-and-carols country Christmas Eves of my own childhood. But at the Brizzis’ tenth-floor apartment in midtown Manhattan, at around 9 p.m. Christmas Eve twenty or thirty boisterous people showed up for Angelo’s grand seafood extravaganza. Angelo cooked his Christmas Eve seafood dinner in deference to his Sicilian wife Maria and her sister Grace who lived with them, as a Christmas Eve fish feast is more southern Italian than Tuscan. He cooked most of it in a kitchen the size of a station wagon (there was another kitchen, even smaller, a few yards away, for overflow), and the feast was followed by opening presents at midnight, with Christmas Day itself merely a calm denouement.
The meal often began with a rich linguine with white clam sauce, followed by lemony squid and octopus salads, a whole poached salmon with an herby sauce, sole francese, salt cod baked in tomatoes (Grace’s contribution) and the perennial favorite: pounds upon pounds of butterflied jumbo shrimp francese soaked in tangy lemon sauce. Side dishes included an elaborate salad, gratinéed fennel, slow-roasted potatoes and carrots with Grand Marnier. There were red and white wines in abundance and always too many desserts, brought by guests: ice cream, tarts, my mocha pecan pie and my sister-in-law Terry’s assortment of cheesecakes and pound cakes.
During the long, loud, joyful meal, Angelo sat at the head of the table, letting loose an unstoppable stream of raunchy jokes and innuendos with ribald glee, shocking the urbane Maria, all in his thick Italian accent (I often understood him better when he spoke Italian). Handsome Angelo, his hair dyed red-brown until late in life, managed to carry off a unique mix of earthy and elegant. He had once lived in Greenwich Village, an actor in the Italian theater. And there was a theatrical air at the Brizzis’ holiday tables, between Angelo’s entertaining personality and that of the actors and costume designers that Maria and Grace knew through their theatrical costume shop, often guests at holiday meals.
Generous to a fault, Angelo once literally wrestled his cousin to the ground over a restaurant bill, she a sophisticated Tuscan furrier much younger than him. Sentimental Angelo was as generous with his fierce hugs as he was with the food on the groaning boards he laid out. When my husband and I arrived for a visit he always squeezed me in a big hug and thanked me tearfully for “bringing” his son to see him.
But sometimes Angelo would tease or goad his wife or sons mercilessly just to spark things up a bit, or he would pick a fight at the breakfast table and then storm off and pout all day. His favorite things to do besides cooking were reading, listening to opera (Madam Butterfly made him cry), watching soccer (made him yell), or Benny Hill (to laugh).
Angelo’s stomach was too delicate and ulcer-ridden to eat foods like the salamis and beans he loved best; he could drink only room temperature liquids and eat only small amounts of the blandest food. But he enjoyed the vicarious pleasure of watching his loved ones enjoy eating and he spoiled us for life by packing goodies for us to take home after our visits, like huge slabs of smoked salmon or tubs of lobster chunks from the Palm restaurant where he worked as a waiter. He knew where to get the creamiest Pecorino Toscano, the winiest olives, and exotic melons at their peak of perfection to wrap with the sweetest, thinnest prosciutto in New York.
He roasted and marinated red and yellow peppers and stewed tripe just for us to snack on. He slathered decadent Tuscan chicken liver pate on crispy crostini for elegant dinners. Once he learned that I loved to cook, he would buy me ingredients like giant artichokes, portabello mushrooms, legs of baby lamb or filets mignon with a can of green peppercorns for the sauce.
Before I knew better I would try to help him in the kitchen, but he was critical and my efforts invariably fell short. Eventually I learned, like the rest of the family had, to stay out of his way in the kitchen.
* * *
Italian-American Christmas traditions have their roots in the diverse regions of Italy, but the “Feast of the Seven Fishes” is a mostly American development, known only in a few tiny pockets of southern Italy. For Italian Catholics, the day before Christmas, La Vigilia, is a sacred fast day such as Good Friday, on which no meat can be eaten, although in modern times in Italy many no longer follow the rule. Like a lot of other immigrant traditions, the big fish feast has all but disappeared back in the old country. Angelo’s fellow Tuscans who still live in Italy have no traditional Christmas Eve meal nor any restrictions against eating meat.
Traditional dishes for the Italian-American cenone usually include salt cod (baccalá) and smelts, both of which have fallen by the wayside over the years due to undeserved dips in popularity. If it weren’t for Grace, salt cod would have not been part of the Brizzi cenone. I would have missed it, a tasty Sicilian dish of fish with tomato, onion, dark and golden raisins and green and black olives. Angelo never served fried smelts, since he and Maria never liked any kind of oily fish. A fine fat eel (capitone) is traditional, too, promising coming renewal and happiness, but it never had a place on their table either.
Second and third generation Italian-Americans and chefs alike have gotten wild and wooly with their own interpretations of the classics. So on Italian-American Christmas Eve tables you’ll find stuffed clams, seafood crepes, swordfish with orange sauce or with capers and vinegar, mussels oreganato, fried oysters, stuffed squid, scallops, whiting, flounder, grilled halibut, lobster fra diavolo or in ravioli with vodka sauce, sole stuffed with crab and shrimp, homemade pasta with lobster sauce and squid meatballs, lobster bisque, codfish fritters, salt cod salad, grilled tuna with capers, shrimp scampi, smoked salmon, trout or bluefish, roasted sea bass, lasagna, cuttlefish or sea urchins.
Boston Chef Marc Orfaly has offered a calamari confit with braised romaine, currants and walnut foam. At Grotto in the same city you can celebrate Christmas eve with a dish of pan-roasted jumbo diver scallop, wild mushroom risotto, truffle-basted cod and fresh shaved Alba white truffles.
Or just have the traditional feast of the one fish and call out for pizza with anchovies.
You gotta have some vegetables, too, and you might find cauliflower, likely fried, or string beans, marinated artichoke hearts, sweet bell peppers roasted or stuffed, stuffed artichokes or eggplant alla parmigiana or in cold pickled caponata.
Then wash it all down with plenty of strong coffee, digestive liqueurs like Sambuca or Fernet Branca, with some ricotta pie, fig cookies, almond biscotti, torrone (nougat), fruit-studded panettone, dense panforte di Siena or just dried figs and dates with nuts.
* * *
The last Christmas Eve dinner Angelo cooked was at the end of 2000, and his son Albert’s wife Kristin did much of it, while once energetic Angelo sat and smiled weakly through his pain. Two months later he would be dead, of kidney cancer, his first two grandchildren on the way. He would never cook another meal. He left a lot of Christmas Eve regulars missing his feasts, and missing him: funny, silly, loving Angelo. I know I do.
On Christmas Eve these days I know I can’t fill his shoes, but I make seafood dinners, sometimes pasta with crabmeat, always lemony seafood salad, Sicilian salt cod and that heavenly butterflied shrimp francese—he was mostly stingy about giving out his recipes, until the cancer came and he gave me the shrimp one and a few others. When I make Christmas Eve dinner I want to channel his generosity of spirit and his wondrous capability to crank out quantities of marvelous food, hoping that the grandchildren he never knew will in some indirect way know him. But most days I just want him back for a day, to give us a hug and a meal like no one else can.
How many fishes?
Why does the Feast of the Seven Fishes have to have seven kinds of fish? Or is it thirteen? On Christmas Eve I always do an odd number, three if it’s just us, or seven for a big crowd, but some cooks swear by nine, ten, eleven or even 25. Here are a variety of explanations I’ve run across for what the numbers stand for. So cook as much fish as you want to, and take your pick.
3:
- The Three Wise Men
- The Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost
7:
- The seven sacraments of the Catholic Church
- The seven days it took God to create the universe
- The seven days of the week
- The number of perfection in Biblical numerology
- The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit
- The seven champions of Christendom
- The seven winds of Italy
- The seven hills of Rome
- The seven pilgrimage churches in Rome
- The seven wonders of the world
- The seven veils of Salome
- The seven deadly sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride)
- The seven cardinal virtues (faith, hope, charity, temperance, prudence, fortitude and justice)
- The last seven of the Ten Commandments, all rules for human interaction (the first three concern human relations with God)
9:
- The Holy Trinity times three
- The nine months that Mary carried Jesus
10:
- The ten Stations of the Cross
11:
- The apostles minus Judas
12:
- The original 12 apostles
13:
- The apostles plus Jesus
25:
- The days of the Christmas season