Christmas Eve: Feast of the Seven, Nine or Thirteen Fishes. And Omega3

[No Elephants]

My best friend in high school had been born in Naples and lived there until she emigrated to the US when she was 5. Her mother was one of several great home cooks whom I have been blessed to have had in my life growing up.

Her mother had grown up in northern Italy. She could do the standard pasta and tomato sauce beautifully, for sure, but the fare she cooked up daily was Northern Italian.

Which brings me to the feast of the fishes. She would serve it after midnight mass on Christmas Eve and on New Year's Eve. I always wore a relatively small size, but I also always loved to eat. So, my first encounter with being invited to eat after midnight was memorable.

I never counted the different kinds of fish she served. Guess I was too busy digging into the shrimp cocktail? But, as I got older, I heard more and more about the feast of the fishes.

Some say it's seven fishes, for the seven sacraments, or because seven is the number mentioned most in the Bible (or so wiki says). Some say seven, for the seven days of creation--but, there only six days of creation, followed by a day of rest. Some say it's nine fishes, for the nine months that Mary carried Jesus. Some say it's 13 fishes. I have no idea why.

Like a lot of religious traditions, it turns out to be good for you. Well, not necessarily 7 to 13 varieties of fish in one meal, but it turns out that fish is much better for you than meat. (And shellfish, forbidden entirely to Jews, is much less good for you than are other kinds of seafood.)

Did the shrimp that I scarfed down during my first feast of the fishes really religiously even qualify as one of the seven fishes, though, or only as seafood? Is it really a feast of seven fishes, or only a feast of seven varieties of seafood? Would seaweed and other sea plants qualify as varieties for purposes of the feast of 7(or 9 or 13) "fishes?" I have no idea.

What was the deal with Catholics and fish anyway?

An early Pope supposedly said that the Friday fast was in commemoration of Jesus's sacrifice on the cross on Good Friday. But why fish? Why not abstinence or dairy or veggies? I've heard that fishermen appealed to the Pope, who then instituted meatless Fridays and various other meatless days. Or was it because so many of Christ's disciples, including Peter, had been fishers before deciding to follow Jesus during his ministry? No clue.

BTW, the wiki on this ludicrously says that it was fish because meat and butter were forbidden on fast days, so Catholics chose fish, which can be fried in olive oil. Hello? Every Italian I've ever known prefers cooking their own cuisine with olive oil to cooking with butter. So, I'm guess whoever stuck that bit into the wiki is not familiar with Italian home cooking. (I've never heard of butterless Fridays, but I cannot speak to that part for certain.)

Anyway, eating more fish, very preferably wild caught, is good for you, whether on Christmas Eve or not.

BTW, some of the older Italian widows in my neighborhood who were in their 80s and 90s about ten years ago, would tell that me that their husbands fished for a living--out of Boston harbor. Of course, that ended when the water in historic Boston harbor got so polluted that nothing could survive in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqKHqWaTv9g

(Oddly, the Standells were a Los Angeles garage band.)

The son of Italian immigrants, however, was instrumental in the clean up of Boston harbor, Judge A. David Mazzone.

"He will forever be remembered by the people of Massachusetts for his landmark rulings that led to the cleanup of Boston Harbor," United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy said to the Boston Globe shortly after Mazzone's death in October 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._David_Mazzone

As a result, there is a memorial to the judge on Deer Island, in Boston harbor, which is where the sewage treatment plant is located. Touching and gross, at the same time.