For 36 years, Nancy Longo has cooked seafood in a cluttered kitchen the size of an elevator. The other night she took the traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes to the top floor, and invited me to go along for the ride.
Staging the traditional Italian Christmas Eve meal six days ahead of schedule for 20 guests at her Pierpoint Restaurant in Fells Point, Longo went with soup as an opener — a savory, clear broth with Chesapeake clams, leeks, spinach, lemon and truffle oil.
For the second course, she sauteed chunks of butternut squash until they were soft, almost creamy, then mixed them with creamier risotto. She then summoned her longtime sous chef, Chris Holley, to add chunks of hot, buttered-up lobster to each of the 20 plates sitting on the service counter.
The courses that followed were equally impressive — sauteed shrimp with roasted potatoes and basil alfredo; rockfish with corn, tomato and broccolini in sage butter; scallops in a cherry-balsamic caramel with smoked salmon-ricotta ravioli.
If you’re counting, that’s seven fishes. That’s the minimum required for the feast, though other cooks who maintain this tradition every Christmas Eve go further with it, up to 13 fishes. It’s believed that the seven fishes represent the seven sacraments of the Catholic faith while 13 represents Jesus and the 12 apostles.
Either way, it’s an old Roman Catholic premise for eating lots of seafood on the night before Christmas.
I have long experience with the feast. My Italian-American mother prepared seven fishes every Dec. 24 — baccala (more on that in a moment), smelts, eel, sardines, fresh haddock or flounder, shrimp, calamari and anchovies served in hot olive oil and garlic on vermicelli.
I’ve carried on the tradition as an amateur cook, preparing the feast for family and friends, but, of course, at nowhere near the elevated level Longo reached this past Saturday night.
Not that there’s anything wrong with a gourmet take!
In fact, as a longtime professional chef and proprietor of a restaurant well-known for seafood, Longo was obligated to go upscale with her version of the feast. At $75 each, her customers expected that.
Despite being of Italian-American heritage (on her father’s side), Longo’s family never had the seven-fish Christmas Eve meal like the one my mother prepared.
Which might explain why she left the baccala to me.
Nothing besides eel is more associated with the Feast of the Seven Fishes than baccala — the dried, salted codfish reconstituted and prepared 100 different ways in Italian, Hispanic and Portuguese households. It’s the stuff of the Old World, once a staple now pretty much limited, in the U.S. anyway, to Christmas fare.
There’s really no practical reason for baccala anymore. They have this thing called “refrigeration” now; you can freeze fish for months. The original concept — drying out flanks of Atlantic cod and salting them to preserve them — goes back centuries. It remains a Christmas desire because of the unique flavor. Baccala (the Spanish word is bacalao, in Portuguese bacalhau) survives for taste and tradition.
I bought my flanks this year from Trinacria, the 117-year-old Italian market on North Paca Street that’s almost as intimate, in terms of available space, as Longo’s kitchen. (The baccala was more expensive this year because of the Trump administration’s tariffs on products imported from Canada.)
I took them home, soaked and rinsed the flanks in water over three days, then cooked them a bit, broke them into shards of white meat and mixed them into a salad of olives, onions, capers, tomatoes, peppers, canellini beans and artichoke hearts. We served it at Pierpoint on a small, round plate with a piece of crusty baguette. The chef approved.
The treat for me was watching Longo and Holley, the sous chef at Pierpoint since the restaurant opened in 1989, prepare course after course in that little kitchen. Longo adapted to the small space long ago, evident from the way she moved and worked within it — casually yet confidently reaching for tools and ingredients, carrying on an amusing conversation about fish while the blue flames of gas burners lapped around pots and pans inches from where Longo held court.
It’s a magical thing to see up close — from a small place of cluttered mayhem comes well planned, precisely measured and carefully presented courses, one after another, out to the dining room in the hands of young servers.
I know what you’re wondering: What about dessert?
It was pistachio crème brûlée, served with a chocolate spoon and truffles.
So yeah, there’s a lot to be said for taking the Feast of the Seven Fishes up a few flights.
Buone Natale!
To see photos of Nancy Longo at work, click here.
Dan Rodricks writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. His column will resume in the new year. He can be reached via danrodricks.com
