Italian families anticipate Christmas with a feast of fish

Yes, we do. We didn't have access to quite the variety in Cleveland, but we ate baccala every year. The key is to soak the cod for a few days to cut the briny taste. We never had the snail salad in Cleveland, but my wife's Italian grandmother who lives in Rhode Island has made it for me and I love it (some of you might have tried it at my wife's graduation party).

The article is pretty hard on smelts, which I love. They are a fresh water lake fish, so we got them pretty easy in Cleveland. The key to smelts is to get small ones--if they are too big they can be bony and too fishy tasting.

It became a tradition in our family to have homemade ravioli on Christmas eve. These are real ravioli, not those little dinky things you get at most places. To give you an idea of how filling our family ravioli is, one of our family traditions is that grandpa gives a dollar to any of the kids who could eat their age in raviolis. Almost no one could do it. I'm a pig and I couldn't do it past age seven. Until, I must add, at age twenty-one I actually ate twenty-one of those frickin' things. I was at the absolute height of my eating powers--in the best shape of my life and with a blazing metabolism. Of course I still couldn't feel my legs for a week, but it was worth it for that dollar.

Anyway, this article got me thinking that I might have to find some smelts to go along with the stuffed shells I'm making this Christmas eve. You are all, of course, invited.