Since the time of Christ, fish was a part of the culture of the Catholic Church. Saint Peter and Christ’s disciples fished on the Sea of Galilee. When I was growing up, the church forbid eating meat on Fridays.
The Christmas Eve tradition of eating a festive meal composed of only seafood, traditionally seven unique types, was, over centuries, carried with the migrations of people from Italy into central and eastern Europe where ancestors of my mother, Myrtle Chaussee Hoffbeck, resided. In the eighteenth century my ancestors crossed the Atlantic to settle in Quebec, Canada, and then, after a dangerous trip across Lake Superior, to Ft. Pierre, SD.
My mother, Aunt Marian, and Uncle Brit were raised after their mother died by their maternal grandmother in Pierre, SD in a French-speaking household. For practical reasons, she reduced the number of seafood recipes from seven down to five.
My mom did her best to follow the Christmas Eve tradition of multiple seafood courses, though she had to pare down the menu from five fish dishes to three. The first course was always oyster stew, the second dried cod, and, substituting for fresh salmon, the final, salmon patties.
When my Uncle Brit moved to Alaska shortly after World War II, he sent Christmas packages to our family. One year, among gifts for all of us, were two large cans of oyster stew. The oysters had been farmed in huge open crates off the Kenai Peninsula. When my brother Bob and I drove the Kenai Highway in 2002, the fisheries were still thriving; we saw the giant crates in the water not far from the shore.
Enclosed in Uncle Brit’s package was a note explaining that this would be the best oyster stew we’d ever tasted. My mother opened one can, and following the directions, heated the contents. After tasting the stew, she added a little cream and liberal amounts of salt and pepper, but the stew remained gummy and tasteless. I wasn’t the only one at the table that night that had trouble finishing the serving. My mother, who never was able to throw food away, placed the second can in the pantry. Months later when Brit and his wife came to visit, she served samples of her stew and the Alaska oyster stew to Brit. After only a few spoonfuls, he readily admitted that my mother’s was far superior.
When I married, I further “revised” the traditional menu by excluding the oyster stew and the dried cod and by adding shrimp and baked salmon. In the following years in order to have the meal ready to serve when we returned from church, I only served dishes that could be made ahead and kept in the refrigerator. I added French potato salad (which my mother made in the spring using new potatoes from the garden), and a baked sweet potato casserole.
Year by year, I kept embellishing the menu with different items: cucumber salad which added sourness to contrast with the delicately flavored shrimp, large baked stuffed mushrooms to awaken taste buds with spices, and three sauces. The mushrooms had to be pure white. Finding twenty of the just-right size often required a trek to more than one market. Making them involved a series of laborious tasks. One year, in the interest of time, I substituted another recipe that required no scooping, chopping, sautéing, or basting, and that could be made in a quarter of the time.
As we sat down to eat, my youngest son asked, “Did you leave your mushrooms in the kitchen? If you tell me where they are, I’ll go get them.” He was visibly disappointed when I told him they didn’t exist. At the end of the meal there were still several of the fake variety on the serving dish.
My mother always placed a dish of cranberry sauce on the table and I continued that tradition. Olives (my favorite) became another must-have. They go well with the baguette that keeps the French on the table.