So What Kind of Pasta Do You Eat on Christmas Eve?

One of the first blogs I ever wrote was about an Italian American Christmas Eve, and here we are with Christmas Eve a couple of short days away, and once again, I am dwelling on the food part of the holiday. At Mass at Sacred Hearts/St. Stephen’s Church on Sunday, Monsignor Massie advised us not to get taken in by the “cute” of Christmas, that it’s not about buying gifts and doing all the extras; that our tables never look like the Hallmark version of a holiday. That is for sure! Unfortunately, it’s very hard to break out of what Christmas has become for most of us: an over-the-top decorating, shopping, gift-giving, card writing, wrapping, baking, trying to do it all frenzy of a season. And for us Italian Americans, it’s also very much about the food and that is something we can really not skimp on. We don’t just celebrate Christmas Day to the hilt, we also have the food extravaganza of the year on Christmas Eve.

For Christmas Eve, also known as La Vigilia or the Feast of the Seven Fishes, Italian Americans typically did not eat any meat. As my friend, Vito, says, “only the Italians could turn something of abstinence into a feast.” After a “light antipasto,” we have at least seven types of fish. The selection varies from family to family, depending on which region of Italy your ancestors came from and different adaptations that occurred once they got here. One requirement, however, is that there must be a pasta dish! The pasta course is usually the second course (the third if you count the antipasto), right after the baked clams and seafood salad, and I think it might be my favorite part of the meal. The pasta can be as simple as spaghetti aglio e olio (spaghetti with garlic and oil). Some people add anchovies and toasted breadcrumb to the garlic and oil which makes for a delicious salty dish. The Christmas Eve pasta dish most often includes the pre-requisite of the holiday - seafood!

My friend, RoseMarie’s family always had crab sauce until the year that there were no crabs to be found and they had to make do with lobster (not too shabby a substitute). I love a tasty crab sauce but it is a lot of work to extract the crabmeat from those hard shells and it also makes my mouth a little itchy. And my friend, LouAnne’s family has a choice of two or three pastas on Christmas Eve!! They usually have pasta with crab sauce, clam sauce, and a stuffed calamari sauce. That’s as many choices as a trattoria!

My cousins in Colorado have a very impressive frutti di mare fra diavolo! That is a medley of shellfish in a spicy tomato sauce. And if that’s not enough of pasta, my cousin Chichi might also make a spaghetti pie. My cousin, Emilia, who is one of the few cousins left in Brooklyn makes a combination mussel/clam sauce over spaghetti.

The pasta dish of choice for my family has always been linguine with white clam sauce. My mom always gets the clams from the Carroll Gardens Fish Market on Court Street; she has been going there since it was known as Cusimano’s. She orders four dozen cherrystone clams, shucked (no shells, just the clams and the juice). We pick them up on our way to my sister’s in Manalapan, NJ. Once there, my mom cleans each clam and chops them up and strains the clam juice in a fine mesh sieve to remove any sediment. She sautées a healthy amount of minced garlic in a good olive oil with a dash of crushed red pepper. She then adds the clam juice, a splash of white wine, the clams and lots of chopped parsley. The clams only take a couple of minutes to cook. Once the linguine is perfectly al dente, she tosses it all with the clam sauce and the end result is honestly making my mouth water just writing about it! Of course, you have to have a nice piece of Italian bread (also from Brooklyn), to mop up your plate.

This is the same clam sauce recipe that my grandfather Ciro brought from Ischia with him and made when my mom was growing up in Red Hook. It was what we had each Christmas Eve on DeGraw Street when we were kids and the recipe has traveled with us to the suburban houses of my sisters. My Uncle Johnny carried that recipe when he moved his family south and it is what most of his eight children and their children will be having on Christmas Eve in Virginia. How lucky we are to have a recipe that has been carried down from generation to generation and from place to place!

We surely show love through food and there is no better example than the traditions of Christmas Eve. Whatever you are having on Christmas Eve, whether you have pasta or not, I’m sure it will be delicious. I wish you a buon appetito and a Buon Natale a tutti !!