JOAN ACOCELLA
My ex-husband didn’t care much for Christmas. What he loved was the night before Christmas. He was one of those Italian-Americans who in the wake of the civil-rights movement got deeply into their ethnic roots. So did others in his family, and consequently we spent a lot of time at what I recall as eighteen-hour cousins’ parties, where they would all pass around Grandma’s immigration papers and talk about the time Uncle Angelo got kicked by the mule. My son and I, when we had to go to these affairs, used to stow magazines in the glove compartment, and every few hours or so we would sneak out to the car for a little rest.
Around this time, too, my husband decided to Italianize our Christmas. The people in his grandparents’ generation had followed the old-country custom of eating their feast not on December 25th, but the night before. And it wasn’t turkey; it was a nine-course fish dinner. (December 24th was a fast day—no meat. Nine courses of fish was their way of fasting.) My in-laws, by way of assimilating, had switched over to turkey. This now seemed to my husband a hideous betrayal. We were going back to the old way, he declared. So the next December 24th, and every December 24th after that, we had a dinner that could kill an army.
Many of his recipes came out of Marcella Hazan’s excellent cookbooks, but he had his problems with Marcella Hazan. Number one, she was a Northern Italian, which in his mind, as in the minds of most of the descendants of the largely Southern Italian people who immigrated to this country at the turn of the century, meant snob, cake-eater—Protestant, even. (Anna Magnani, as these people will point out to you, was not a Northern Italian.) Number two, Marcella Hazan tried to demystify Italian cooking, turn it over to non-Italians. In America, anyone can be President, and in Marcella Hazan anyone can make minestrone.
This worried my husband. Pretty soon, he figured, you’d have Basques, Northumbrians, British Columbians making Italian dinners. He preferred cookbooks that kept a few veils on. A favorite of his was Ada Boni’s “Talisman Italian Cook Book,” which you used to be able to get by sending in four dollars and ninety-five cents with a coupon from the Ronzoni box. Ada Boni called for things like “1 large can Italian tomatoes.” How large? Only an Italian would know. Best of all, he would have liked a cookbook that said, “Take a handful of chopped meat, add some parsley, throw it in the scolabast.…” That would keep the Northumbrians out of the kitchen.
“See here, Pottsman! That happens to be my secretary!”
The menu of his Christmas Eve feast changed from year to year, but certain items remained constant. For the appetizer course, he always served mozzarella in carrozza, because everyone loved it. For the salad course, he always had Ada Boni’s shrimp-and-potato salad, because I loved it. And he always made marinated eel, because he liked to drive everyone crazy with it.
He had a weakness for food machismo—that is, he prided himself on eating what you wouldn’t. Tripe was nothing to him; he ate necks, tails, toes. One of the things he loved best was when we were out to dinner with friends and someone confessed an unwillingness to eat certain animal parts. Then he would tell the story of how the biggest treat in his grandfather’s house was capuzzell, or sheep’s head. They would take this head, roast it, and hoist it out onto a platter. Then Grandpa would crack it open. (“Stop! Stop!” we’re all yelling at my husband by now. But there was no stopping him.) Grandpa would crack it open and then stick in the spoon and scoop out (“No! Please!”)—Grandpa would scoop out the brains onto everyone’s plate. The people who were really lucky got the (“No, Nick! Don’t tell us!”)—the people who were lucky got the eyeballs. The story thus triumphantly finished, our dinner companions would look down glassy-eyed at their plates, push them away, and order a drink. And my husband, glowing with happiness and ethnic pride, would pick up his fork and dig into whatever was in front of him—ears, probably.
That’s why he liked the marinated eel. Right around the fourth course of the Christmas Eve feast, he would produce it: a big dead snake in a bowl of yellow oil. “No!” we would scream. “Take it away! Eat it in the kitchen!” And, beaming with joy, he would maneuver the thing onto his plate, eat it by himself, and look at us pityingly.
The rest was magnificent, though: mussel soup, spaghetti with scallops, baccala with olives, bass stuffed with vegetables. This year, he’ll probably be cooking it again, for a tableful of cousins. I can see them now, happily lifting their forks. “Wait!” he says, and runs back to the kitchen for the eel.
1995