IF YOU TALK with an Italian American New Orleanian about the Feast of the Seven Fishes, you’re likely to get an earful of stories of their favorite dishes at the traditional Christmas Eve fête. Pose the same question to an Italian or Sicilian, and the likely answer is that they’ve never heard of it. While the American tradition of Feast of the Seven Fishes is based on a similar meal still celebrated in Italy, immigrants took those customs and added their own spin.
The American version is an honest-to-goodness feast, while its Italian counterpart—a multicourse seafood dinner simply known as La Vigilia—has more traditional Roman Catholic roots. Until the 1960s, Catholics abstained from meat on Christmas Eve, and many have continued that tradition. During the period between 1880 and 1920, millions of people from southern Italy and Sicily immigrated to the United States, many of them settling in the Crescent City. The availability of local seafood made it easy (and delicious) to continue their Christmas tradition.
It’s unclear where the “seven” in the feast’s name came from, but since the number appears more than 700 times in the Bible, there’s room for many theories. Some people even point to the seven hills of Rome. Regardless of where the name originated, the feast offers Louisianans another opportunity to be grateful for the local seafood bounty.
In the Bayou State, it’s easy to knock out one dish with seven different bits of seafood in it, but typically, each course will feature only one or two. Grilled oysters, hot crab dips, and seafood gumbos are common sights, and they often appear alongside more Italian-focused dishes like marinated anchovies, fried smelt, and salt-cod fritters.
For other creative takes on the meal, New Orleanians can turn to local restaurants that celebrate it during the holiday season. At GW Fins in the French Quarter, Executive Sous Chef Tim Lane has run a 30-person wine dinner where they put a Louisiana spin on the classics with dishes like an Italian wedding soup where tuna is used in the meatballs and Peroni beer-battered smelt over fettuccini with truffles.
“One year I did a seafood braciole,” says Tim. “It was sheepshead or drum that I stuffed with soft boiled egg, seasoned breadcrumbs, raisins, and crabmeat. I rolled it up and seared it and it came out awesome. I’m a big fan of Italian food, so I wanted to bring some of those ideas to the surface at GW Fins.”
Over in the Warehouse District, the rustic Italian restaurant Gianna put its stamp on the festive meal. When Gianna Chef de Cuisine Jared Heider imagines the Feast of the Seven Fishes, “I envision serving big bowls of pasta,” he says. “All different types of shellfish: mussels, clams, shrimp, lobster. I’m a big fan of rustic whole-fish preparations where you leave the bones in and pick all the meat off. The sorts of things you’d imagine a feast to be.”
Whether Catholic or not, the Feast of the Seven Fishes gives Louisianans another reason to celebrate the incredible array of locally sourced seafood, from oysters to finfish and everything in between.
Court Bouillon not Couvillion. one is meal the other is last name