Zuppa di Pesce

Christmas is a period when most bloggers are updating constantly with cookies, cakes and treats, traditional dishes from their backgrounds, their families, their childhoods. To those of you who have been sending those pretty little jpegs out into the blogosphere, thank you for making me salivate. As for me, I know that my proverbial radio waves (megs? gigs? bandwith?) have been perhaps more obviously silent since a few days before the Big Day, which, in reality, was marked with both a traditional German and a traditional English Christmas: roast pork and cabbage and cornbread on the 24th and roast beef and potatoes and popovers the 25th. I made these brownies twice and these cookies twice more, but as those of you who know me, whether via this blog or otherwise, are already aware, I play second-fiddle in the Christmastime kitchen, or no fiddle at all.

The Country Boy asked me if I find it strange, to watch as my mother and my sister run around the kitchen, calling on my brother for jobs like removing giant roast beasts from the oven and carrying very heavy, very hot things. I content myself with remaining in my corner of the couch and watching, allowing memories of when this, not Paris, not even boarding school yet, was my reality.

They say you can never go home. I know it’s true now; after spending four months back in the States last year, playing catchup with the childhoods of my siblings I missed between transcontinental flights, I realized that I’m a foreigner in two places, and I’m much happier being a foreigner here, where my accent and my nervous looks at the confusing bureaucracy of banks and post offices give me away. My foreignness in America is much less obvious, which makes it a much heavier weight to bear. Christmas, then, is one of the only times of year that I actually feel foreign–how odd, seeing as it’s also the only time of year I spend the majority of my days speaking my native tongue.

My father likes to remind us–and I like to remember–that the 25th, the day that we feel the collective sigh of international commerce as the Christmas rush ends and baubles go back in their boxes–is really the beginning of the Christmas season. Today, Epiphany, a day marked with galette des rois for most families in France, is the true end, which I suppose means that, at least this year, I did get to spend Christmas in France.

Christmas traditions fascinate me: mine seem à la fois foreign and too familiar, nothing remarkable, until I flick through childhood pictures and remember the wonder of lying under a freshly selected Christmas tree and watching the colored lights burn through the branches. I don’t like receiving gifts and I don’t like flying at the holidays; sometimes it blinds me to the other things I do like: snow, the smell of pine, cinnamon, red and green, crackling fires, black and white Christmas specials, O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

Instead, I watch other people’s Christmas traditions with a strange curiosity, like I’m peering in at dioramas in the natural history museum. The Country Boy spent his Christmas jumping houses amongst different family members, staying up late into the night drinking one of those apéros that exists only in the country, the kind that starts when daylight is just dying and never seems to end. I saw the remains–borrowed cutlery, washed and stacked by the back door, leftover bûche de Noël and macarons–a few mornings later, as we drank coffee and looked out the window to the yard still covered with snow.

Today, I stared through panes of glass into patisseries smelling of warm butter to examine the shiny crusts of galettes des rois today, but I didn’t buy one. I considered it, but in the end, it’s someone else’s tradition. I love my mother’s zuppa di pesce; I’ve always promised myself someday I’ll have a real Italian feast of the 7 fishes, but every year, another Christmas goes by, and every year, I remain staring at the snow instead.

Zuppa di Pesce

Note: My mother’s food is as untouchable as her kitchen. This, a list, is the best I could do.

Olive oil
Fennel fronds
Onion
Garlic
Crushed red pepper
White wine
Canned whole tomatoes
Fish stock
Various fish and crustaceans (crab, mussels, clams, scallops…)
Lemon juice
Italian flat leaf parsley

Finely chop the fennel and onion, and sauté in a generous amount of olive oil with a heavy pinch of salt in a heavy-bottomed saucepan until golden, about 10-15 minutes over medium heat. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper and cook 1-2 minutes, until fragrant. Deglaze with white wine.

Add canned whole tomatoes and fish stock, and bring to a simmer. Cook for 30 minutes, then purée with an immersion blender, adding more fish stock to achieve desired consistency. Taste broth for seasoning.

Add the fish in the order in which it needs to be cooked: mussels take longer than scallops; if your crustaceans are already cooked, drop them in at the last minute to be heated. When all the fish is cooked, serve in bowls topped with freshly squeezed lemon juice and chopped parsley.