Feast of the Seven Fishes, a seven-course seafood Christmas Eve meal, is a popular celebration in North Jersey.
Feast of the Seven Fishes – what IS it?
Not sure what your Italian friends mean when they talk about the Feast of the Seven Fishes? This will help.
Sarah Griesemer, @sarahegriesemer
Feast of the Seven Fishes is popular among Italian-American families on Christmas Eve.Typical fish in the meal include salt cod, octopus, shrimp, clams, lobster and more.There are several fish markets, grocery stores and restaurants offering Feast of the Seven Fishes meals and packages.
It was Christmas Eve at his grandparent’s house some 50 years ago and Jerry Villa’s uncle had a sprig of basil in his ear and a plate of fish in his hands. All Villa, now the executive chef at Ridgewood’s Felina, did at his grandparent’s house as a kid was “cook and eat” with his relatives, but on Christmas Eve they were preparing a special feast.
Amid the merry commotion — aunts and uncles sharing stovetops and broiler pans, dropping shrimp into hot oil and conch into vats of bubbling red sauce — there were the subtle sounds of breaths bated for the sizzling clams oreganata leaving the kitchen and breaths held for the fried eel, “that no one would go near,” he said.
Villa, like many North Jersey Italian-American families, celebrated Christmas Eve with the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a meal comprised of seven different seafood dishes that goes back a century in the U.S., with roots leading back to the early Christians of Rome.
This year, Villa is serving a modern Feast at Felina: oysters, seafood salad, linguine with clams and pan-roasted branzino. Though his elders won’t be in the kitchen with him, it’s still a full-circle moment as his grown children and their families will come to the restaurant to partake in this seasonal seafood tradition he remembers so fondly from his childhood.
“Tradition fades away as you get older. Families grow and split up, siblings move different directions,” he said. “I miss that. I think it’s fun to do all this. And some of our recipes, I got from my grandparents.”
For many in North Jersey, the Feast is an important cultural tie between generations; Villa sees it not only in his own family, but in those of the patrons who’ve come into his restaurants for the meal for over a decade now.
“When I first started doing, that’s the sense you would get like, ‘Wow, this is a great idea. I remember doing this when I was younger,’” he said. “On holidays, you get that vibe in the restaurant that people are happy to be there. They probably are happy they don’t have to cook either.”
Felina isn’t alone in its embrace of the meal. Several other North Jersey restaurants are holding Feast of the Seven Fishes dinners, seafood markets like Metropolitan Seafood in Lebanon are preparing for increased demand, and specialty markets like Uncle Giuseppe’s are offering meal packages.
What is the Feast of the Seven Fishes?
The tradition of abstaining from meat and eating fish on Christmas Eve (and before other holidays) began centuries ago as a Roman Catholic practice in many parts of Italy.
Yet the Feast of the Seven Fishes, specifically, is an Italian-American tradition begun by Italian immigrants — it’s said the number seven refers to the seven sacraments in Catholicism, or seven virtues, or the seventh day of rest, or the seven deadly sins… seven is in the bible a lot. Though the number of fish included in the Christmas Eve feast can rise to 13 in certain traditions.
There’s no set menu for the feast, but a typical meal might include salted cod (baccala), smelt, sardines, shrimp, octopus, clams, mussels, anchovies and more. Some families include seven fish, others choose one or two fish prepared seven ways, and you’ll end up with dishes like baked clams, scungilli (sea snail salad), lobster bisque, fried eel, seafood salad, braised fish in red or white sauce, and more.
It’s important to underscore that the composition of the Feast meal changes from table to table… and that’s OK.
“The thing with Italian cuisine, it’s really subject to whichever family you come from,” said Vinnie Olivieri, culinary director at Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace. “If it is written in a book that you have to have eel or baccala, I don’t know where that book is stored or who wrote it. As long as you can count seven different fish on your table, you’ve succeeded.”
Villa doubled down, saying that not even the number of fish matters if the spirit is in the right place, at least in his family.
“It wasn’t that it had to be this certain dish every year,” he said. “We always had clams oreganata, scungilli, calamari, linguine with clam sauce. My upbringing, I don’t know if it was seven every time.”
Lobster bisque and clams casino… or salt cod and smoked eel?
Fishmonger Mark Drabich of Metropolitan Seafood has been thinking about the Feast for over four decades. When he first started dating his wife, who’s family is 100% Italian, he supplied the fish for Christmas Eve — “and they haven’t paid for it since,” he said.
His paying customers, though, secure their fish orders weeks in advance. There are plenty of them: Drabich said he’ll distribute about 1,000 preorders on Dec. 23 and 24 alone (with plenty of seafood set aside for late-comers). While his shop will have the more mainstream offerings like clams, shrimp and seafood salad, he’s also particularly excited to get the old-school dishes of the Feast into people’s kitchens.
“People are kind of coming back to some of the deeper dives of the Seven Fishes. Some people’s idea of Seven Fishes is flounder, scallops, shrimp, clams casino, you know, where it used to be baccala, eels, pasta con sarde (sardines), anchovies, calamari,” Drabich said. “One of my favorite things is to help younger people who want to go deeper than just shrimp scampi, clams casino. They want to make a quote-unquote authentic dish. That was part of their history and maybe they didn’t watch their grandparents do it, which is really cool.”
To meet that demand, Drabich not only posts entertaining instructional videos on social media, but carries items like baccala and eel in the store so people can make these dishes at home. Baccala is an example of a food an uncurious cook might brush off, but Drabich says a little care (with a desalting and rehydrating bath) goes a long way.
“There is absolutely no substitute for salt cod,” he said. “If you were trying to make a salad, there’s a textural aspect that if you use fresh cod, it would just turn to mush. So you need those big chunks of salt cod, and they stay super firm even after they’re poached.”
Where to celebrate Feast of the Seven Fishes in North Jersey
If you’re cooking and need fresh fish, Metropolitan is a great place to stock up, as are Seafood Gourmet Market in Maywood, The Fish Dock in Closter, Peter’s Fish Market in Midland Park and several others.
While cooking the Feast comes with merit, it’s of course not possible or feasible for everyone. A place like Uncle Giuseppe’s offers customizable to-go packages for such situations. Olivieri grew up with the Feast in his family and took over cooking when his grandfather passed, and now the menu of offerings he’s put out for Giuseppe’s coincides with the dishes he thought fared best.
“We took the more approachable route,” he said. “First and foremost when I put this all together, I asked myself the question, what would I like to see on my Christmas Eve table?”
That includes dishes like baked clams, mini crab cakes, baccala and octopus salad, mussels mariana, lobster fra diavola and more.
If you’re looking to dine out, though, Felina in Ridgewood, Jersey City, Summit and South Orange all have Feast dinners on Christmas Eve (available a la carte or as a prix fixe) as does Blu on the Hudson in Weehawken, featuring a seven-fish nigiri.
Spuntino in Clifton is offering a Feast of the Seven Fishes now through Christmas Eve, a meal it’s been serving since the spot opened in 2012. You can order pieces from it a la carte, order one to share with the table, or dive in on the feast itself, said Spuntino sommelier Regan DeBenedetto, who has paired wines with each dish on the menu.
“To pull this off at home, whether it’s an Italian family or anyone, it’s such an undertaking because you have to get so many ingredients,” she said. “It’s nice to go out and let us do the cleaning.”
Dishes include smoked salmon bruschetta, lobster bisque, seafood ragu with squid ink spaghetti (DeBenedetto’s favorite) and red snapper with pineapple coulis.
Matt Cortina is a food reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.
Dining and Cooking