The Bear: What Is The Tradition Behind The Feast Of The Seven Fishes?
Contains spoilers for Season 2 of "The Bear"
Season 2, Episode 6 of "The Bear" takes the show's kitchen-centered chaos into the Berzatto family home and to an elevated level of mayhem, flashing back about five years to show a tumultuous Christmas Eve dinner hosted by family matriarch Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis). Her guests include her children Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Natalie (Abby Elliott), and Michael (Jon Bernthal), along with more than a dozen friends and family members.
Donna serves oven-roasted branzino (seabass), lobster, and several other meticulously prepared fish and shellfish dishes. Throughout the episode, several guests question the meaning of the traditional feast, and several explanations are offered, although none is ever agreed upon.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes has no roots in Europe and is an exclusively Italian American custom that sprung from Roman Catholic practices of fasting until the evening and abstaining from meat entirely on holy days like Christmas Eve. The count of seven likely came from the figure's prevalence in the Bible, as it marks the number of sacraments and virtues and the day on which God rested after creating the Earth.
The reliance on seafood for sustenance was common in Sicily and Southern Italy, poorer regions of the country from which many Italian American immigrants originated. The specifics of the feast vary from family to family, with many featuring an assortment of shellfish and whole fish menu items such as calamari (squid), scungilli (snails), or pasta with white wine or tomato-based sauces containing shellfish.
The feast is a loosely built New World custom
Cioppino (a tomato-based fish and shellfish stew) is common, and shellfish salads and crab dips are becoming increasingly popular on feast tables. Some restaurants have adopted the tradition, including Chicago's Monteverde. Many families don't adhere strictly to the number seven, increasing that count to more than double the Biblical standard. David Faenza, a native of Puglia, Italy, who now owns the Philadelphia restaurants Salento and L'Angolo, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "We always had 10 or 15, and it would go from 7 p.m. to just before midnight."
The specifics of the feast vary from family to family, although many make the preparation of the dishes a family effort. Donna, however, takes up the burden of doing nearly all of the cooking herself, shooing any would-be helpers from her messy kitchen with a wave of her hand or wooden spoon. She accepts some help from her gourmet chef son Carmy, but is impatient with him throughout the day, keeping the episode's stress level at a peak.
The Berzatto family feast ends in disaster with Michael and his mom's boyfriend "Uncle Lee" (Bob Odenkirk) coming to blows and Donna drunkenly driving her car through the house's front wall in frustration, but viewers get their first extended look at the charismatic, but temperamental Michael, who has been a central figure on "The Bear" despite existing as only a specter and a memory for the series' first 13 episodes.