Seven Fishes, Feasted On
Appropriating Italianx culture, one aqueous species at a time
Last week, I resolved to share more about the meals I make at home, not just those prepared by others. Conveniently, the intervening week contained several major holidays, and with them excuses to prepare an elaborate spread. For the second time in three years, our elaborate spread of choice was the Feast of the Seven Fishes, the Italian-American tradition that turns Christmas Eve into a pescatarian Thunderdome.
Hunter and I are both Jewish, and thus neither Christian nor Italian. But why let a silly thing like religion get between us and a challenge? Like ciabatta or tiramisu, the Feast isn’t even some ancient birthright — it’s yet another Italian-ish practice devised sometime in the last 50 years, making all attempts to get precious about it a bit silly on their face. Besides, I’m the only baker of the two of us, and while I keep telling myself I’ll get my act together and organize a cookie swap, for now this is one bit of goyish culture we can appropriate together.
That said, this iteration of the Feast was not the smoothest gathering we’ve ever hosted. Our guest list ballooned from 11 to 16 and then shrunk all the way down to 7 in the last 24 hours before game time, which induced a lot of stress around having too little and then way too much food. (If you’re one of our friends who couldn’t make it: all reasons for cancelling were totally valid! It was just a lot to deal with in the aggregate!) We also re-learned a lesson we keep memory-wiping, which is that it’s a bad idea for both of us to be actively cooking in our kitchen at the same time.
In the end, everything ended up on the table! It just took a 3pm meltdown in which we briefly considered calling the whole thing off. (Clearly, we pushed through.) Sometimes, though, a mixed success-failure track record is more interesting to recap than an unqualified triumph. Here’s what worked and what didn’t in our Feast — one fish at a time.
Fish 1: Latkes with Sour Cream and Salmon Roe (Hunter)
To start on a positive note: these came out great, and produced absolutely no leftovers because we simply froze the potato-onion mix (sans binders) that didn’t get used. Technically, Hanukkah didn’t start until the next night, but this was a nice way to put a Jew-y spin on a celebration otherwise lifted wholesale from Catholics.
A latke take Hunter and I agree on is that sour cream is the only valid topping, preferably with some kind of fish egg to cut through the fat with some brine. Applesauce is for children! A latke take Hunter and I disagree on is that he makes his extremely thick, but this batch converted me: crispy on the outside, soft within. These were also made after I cleared out of the kitchen entirely, which made for a less hectic experience.
Fish 2: Crab Cakes (Me)
The downside of wrapping my active cooking with 90 minutes to go is that I passively fucked up my first contribution to the meal. I made crab cakes from a recipe I’d used before, from Toni Tipton Martin’s essential cookbook Jubilee. I was so confident! Deep frying at home weirdly doesn’t intimidate me, and these came out of the oil a perfect, crisp-yet-tender golden brown. Just looking at that gorgeous sheet pan above makes me want to cry.
This is when I ran into one of the most predictable obstacles to pulling off a seven-part meal: the timing. To give Hunter space, I fried these off early; to keep them warm, I popped them in the oven, set to what I thought was a reasonably low temperature of 225 degrees. But this is seafood we’re talking about. It’s delicate! And what went in totally company-ready came out looking like…this.
Disaster. These weren’t inedible, but they were much darker and drier than they had been when I sampled one. What was supposed to preserve some freshly cooked appetizers instead kept baking them until they were well past done. Lesson learned; leftovers trashed.
Fish 3: Anchovies with Mayo, Capers, and Sous Vide Eggs (Hunter)
Or: don’t worry, these look grosser than they taste! Hunter is a little obsessed with The Book of St. John, a scripture handed down from the London institution that helped popularize nose-to-tail dining. (Ironically, I’m the only one of us who has actually been. I had squab I was warned may have bullet fragments still in it.) This was loosely adapted from one of its recipes.
Mostly, this dish amounted to putting good anchovies on a plate and not messing around with them, plus or minus some flourishes like homemade mayonnaise — a piece of cake if you have an immersion blender on hand. Hunter’s over-the-top finish was cooking the eggs sous vide, which gave them a bizarre-but-not-unpleasant texture. The yolks actually set before the whites, which is why they’re shrugging off the yellow core like a pashmina in the photo above.
Solid! We have homemade mayo on hand for the foreseeable, which is a nice bonus.
Fish 4: Shrimp Parm Meatballs (Me)
After my failure came my most unqualified success. I’m a big fan of Italian American, a cookbook the couple behind New York’s Don Angie restaurant co-wrote with Jamie Feldmar. At its best, the book is just the right combination of slightly fussy technique with extremely accessible, comforting flavors. You just have to learn which minefields are best avoided entirely; the first time I cooked out of this book, I had to individually fill a pound of rigatoni with sausage filling and served dinner at 9pm whilst covered in sweat and tomato sauce.
This recipe was a first-timer for me, but totally hit that sweet spot. You blend shrimp, a couple cheeses, tomato paste, binders, and seasonings like oregano and garlic powder together in a food processor, bake them off (no stovetop browning!) for just ten minutes, and then fortify some canned crushed tomatoes with butter and white wine. I couldn’t believe how fun and surprising these were for such little effort. They keep well, too — and we’ve still got a bunch of the meatball mix vac-sealed in the freezer.
Fish 5: Scallops with Radicchio in Saffron Cream (Hunter)
Hunter’s also fond of superstar French chef Joel Robuchon’s doorstopper of a book, which runs to thousands of pages with basically no pictures. (You’re getting a real sense of our differing taste in cookbooks here.) This was an attempt at one of his recipes, but Hunter had a hard time getting a sear on the scallops despite drying them out in the fridge for a day and the sauce was a little too creamy and mild. We wouldn’t make this again, but the scallops still felt special. Pro tip: Goldfish Seafood Market in DTLA has the worst name and best prices in the city. Think wholesale discounts, but available in normal-person quantities.
Fish 6: Salmon en Croute (Me)
I’m showing the butchered version, because the intact one looks like a blob of puff pastry. I spliced a bunch of different recipes, because they’re all some version of the same very simple formula (salmon + pastry + some kind of dairy + some kind of vegetable), but owe the most to TikTok creator Zoe Barrie Soderstrom and her use of Boursin cheese.
It’s hard to go wrong with a Wellington riff, because the whole point is that the meat is well-insulated by protective layers and hard to dry out. That was mostly true here…except it fell victim to the same “reheating” process as my crab cakes, magnified by a pizza stone on the bottom rack of our oven. The salmon was great! The burnt pastry that made contact with the pan, less so. Better than a soggy bottom, I suppose.
Fish 7: Clams Oreganata
We finished strong with another banger from Italian American. Open-faced shellfish slathered in garlic butter and topped with breadcrumbs is a classic for a reason, whether it’s oysters Rockefeller or this. Once again, Hunter had the competitive advantage of serving these straight out of the oven, which I do not at all resent him for!
As a postscript, please enjoy a photo of the iced ricotta cookies our friend Lani brought for dessert.
Bellissima!
This concludes my final newsletter of 2024. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I hope to keep this going in 2025. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to make lemonade from lemons and have a nice meal in on NYE, one of the worst holidays there is. Happy New Year, dear subscribers!