Baccalà

The story

Salt cod (baccalà) on the Italian Christmas Eve table is closely tied to the Catholic custom of fasting. Until the 1960s, December 24 was a day of strict abstinence from meat, and fish was the permitted substitute. In Italy's hilly regions far from the sea, where fresh fish was not available, salt-cured cod, which could be kept for months, became the practical and affordable solution. Interestingly, what Americans today call the "Feast of the Seven Fishes," a festive dinner of seven fish dishes, is actually an American invention; neither the name nor the number is originally Italian. The earliest written trace of the phrase was found only in a 1983 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and in Italy itself the custom is simply called "Vigilia di magro," the meatless vigil, with no prescribed number of dishes. Southern Italian immigrants in America, carrying with them the habit of eating salt cod on Christmas Eve, gradually built that habit into a full-fledged feast that today sounds "older" and more Italian than it really is, a fine example of how tradition grows in the diaspora, not only in the country of origin.