#Bread

Yuletide Eats/Cucina de Natale

I’ve blogged previously about recipes from my Jewish grandma.  I have, however, been remiss in addressing my other culinary heritage.  For Christmas, I’m home with my Mom, and I think it’s time to come clean: I’m a pizza bagel.  Half Jewish.  Half Italian.  Actually, half Jewish and one quarter Italian/one quarter Welsh.  So, enough with the bagels: it’s time for pizza.  This Christmas, in between family time, I’m working a few traditional recipes into our meals, and posting them up here.

In Italian families, it’s traditional on Christmas Eve to eat fish.  When big clans get together they’ll often have a “Feast of Seven Fishes.”  I did this once with my grandparents and their friends: the feast lasted about 7 hours, with intense numbers of courses and a ridiculous amount of food.  Because last night it was just me and my mom, we just made a really nice fish stew.  I took the stew out of my mom’s copy of Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cook BookMarcella, if you haven’t heard of her, is to Italian cooking as Julia Child is to French: she wrote one of the first great English-language cook books for her cuisine – published in 1973.

We chose to do her brodetto di papi – “Dad’s soup.”  It’s a simple, flavorful homestyle fish stew.  Marcella’s recipe calls for whole fish and for pureeing of fish heads: I am technically on vacation and was simply not up for this.  So, to add flavor I substituted Madeira wine for white, and tossed in a tablespoon of baharat.  Cross-cuisine blog fusion!  It turned out tasty and festive, if I may say so myself.  I’m putting both versions of the recipe below (omitting fish heads), so you can try it old-school or modified.

While I was cleaning fish yesterday, my mom was pulling together a panettone – an Italian Christmas bread.  This bread has been a feature of my Christmas morning for as long as I can remember, and is largely responsible for making me a little obsessed with candied fruits (I love little surprise chunks of citron, citrus peel, etc.).  My mom uses a recipe from the old Vegetarian Epicure: it’s not a family recipe, but I’ve been eating it for so long that it is tradition. It’s not my handiwork, but I’m putting up pictures and recipe anyway – guest food is welcome!

Finally, today I’ve been heading north, so-to-speak, and paying tribute to my Anglo-Celtic heritage by trying my hand at figgy pudding.  Yes, the thing from “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.”  I got this recipe from my mom’s copy of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cook Book: her copy is actually a 1970 edition picked up around that time in Taiwan.  The best bit: it’s pirated.  Yes, people apparently used to pirate books as well as DVDs.  I actually have pirated Taiwanese bound editions of Golden Age Batman and Superman comics my Dad picked up on that same trip.  (These volumes are totally the “root” of my comic book geekdom.  Thanks, Dad!)  About Craig Claiborne, though, if recipe copyrights are dubious/thin, is there really a big problem with a pirated cookbook?  Something for my lawyer readers to chew on along with Christmas dinner…

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