Festa Dei Pesci

"Take some macaroni home!"

"No, I can't! I made macaroni three times this week!"
"I understand. [Pause.] Take some macaroni home!"-- two of my aunts

I'm Italian-American, so Christmas Eve in my family means a crazy, raucous, seafood-based meal with a couple dozen relatives and entirely too much food. Entirely too much amazing, incredible food so delicious that I had three helpings of it.

We started off with antipasto -- provolone and parmigiana, cured meats, dried sausages, bread with chunks of prosciutto baked in, and a variety of pickled vegetables.

Next came the macaroni course, and we offered three different varieties: linguine in a red fish sauce, rigatoni marinara, and penne a la vodka. Shrimp, fried calimari, and potato croquettes were available as hot appetizers.

The centerpiece of the meal -- zuppa di pesce -- followed. Though the name of this dish translates to "soup of fish," it's actually far more complicated and rich than the name suggests. Ours featured mussels, clams, scallops, lobster tails, crab legs, cod, squid, shrimp, and scungilli stewed in a zesty tomato sauce.

If anyone was still hungry after that, we also had some escarole and beans and veal valdestano (cutlets topped with prosciutto, mozzarella, mushrooms, and roasted red peppers). We then finished off the meal with a cold seafood salad.

I didn't photograph the dessert spread because I was too full and happy to pick up my camera by that point.

Ironically enough, the inspiration for our meal -- the traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes -- came into existence during the Middle Ages as an exercise in abstinence from meat and culinary moderation. Ha!