Although I missed home terribly during the Christmas season, I count myself lucky to have shared Christmas dinner with Materani. Both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I spent at the homes of friends, and both events afforded a culinary experience not soon forgotten.
I’m not sure what Americans typically eat on Christmas Eve. Since I was very young, my family has always had pizza, either homemade, or as life gets ever more frenetic, pizza ordered from Vocelli’s or Papa John’s. But I’m sure that a very small percentage of Americans this year ate a meal similar to what I had. To start, the hostess offered us appetizers of champagne, pizze rustiche, and pettole. (Pizze rustiche are like inverted pizzas, pettole, as you will recall, are the fried batter balls.) When we sat down to table, we found dishes heaped with cozze, mussels. These are eaten with your hands, and indeed, it is strenous work to snap open the shells, to extract, in the end, only a shred of meat. Soon each plate was stacked with shells.
Then the gamberetti (shrimp and squid) were passed around, with a bit of lemon for flavouring. And then—well, being untutored in the typical American cuisine for Christmas Eve, I didn’t have any expectations, but I wasn’t quite prepared for—oh, octopus salad? Don’t mind if I do.
L’insalata di polpo consisted of violet pieces of octopus tentacles, suckers intact. Determined to try everything, I accepted a small portion, and found, actually, that octopus is only remarkable in that it is chewy. Quite chewy.
We ate regular salad, well-oiled, before embarking on the second course, spaghetti with vongole. Italians have a knack at making a tasty dish with few ingredients—pasta, oil, salt, perhaps some butter, and the principal garnish, be it vongole, as in this case, or flecks of peperone crusco. The third course was served to those who did not complain with enough conviction of a full stomach. Thus, I ate pesce di spada (swordfish), slightly spicy and quite tender. Later, I asked my students if that night’s menu was traditional, and learned that fish is to Materani what pizza is to the Marrelli-Kelley clan on Christmas Eve.
My favorite part of the meal was, perhaps, when the hostess placed baskets of nuts and fruit on the table. My Italian-American mother had often told me of how at Christmas her family ate nuts and fruit. Christmas morning, the children found oranges in their stockings (I never did understand why citrus fruit was considered such a treat in sunny California). We peeled fruit and waged war on the nuts with little attention to where the peels and shells landed. I marveled as my hostess, after watching my pathetic struggles with the schiaccianoci (nutcracker), broke walnuts with her bare hands. After the fruit-and-nut course, the hostess simply gathered up the tablecloth.
I may not be an expert on American culinary habits, but I’m pretty sure that sweets are a-plenty on Christmas Eve. If I had been in America, I would have sampled the full complement of sweets set out by my mother—Christmas cut-outs, pfefferneuse, gingerbread men, chocolate truffles, my mother’s Springerly cookies (a requisite to every Christmas because they are fat-free), Trader Joe’s peppermint sandwich cookies, oatmeal cookies, chocolate chip cookies, candy canes, and to drink, hot chocolate or cider. The sweet finale to that night’s dinner was, in comparison, restrained. As the host passed around goblets of champagne, the hostess cut slices of panettone alla tartuffe, panettone with the soft part marbled with chocolate and the top crust glazed with chocolate.
At the stroke of midnight, the family flocked onto the balcony to greet Christmas Day, waiving sparklers and crying Auguri! We then exchanged auguri, kissing each other on the cheek. It already being Christmas Day, there was no need to wait to open presents: children and adults exchanged gifts. And then, I’m not sure if it was sleepiness, or perhaps it was the thought of another Christmas dinner to be eaten the next day that made us wish each other one more time “Auguri to all, and to all a good night.”
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