Why Italians Eat Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve

Italians eat seven fishes on Christmas Eve because the Catholic Church treated the night before a major feast as a vigil, a day of abstinence when meat was off the table. Southern Italian families did what cooks on the coast always do when meat is forbidden: they cooked seafood, and then they cooked a lot of it. The dishes are real and specific, including salt cod (baccalà), fried eel (capitone), linguine with clams, fried calamari, stuffed squid, marinated anchovies, and shrimp. The number seven, though, is the part almost everyone gets wrong. It is an Italian American addition, not an Italian rule, and no one has ever produced a documented origin for it.

For centuries, Catholic practice attached fasting and abstinence to the eves of major feasts, so Christmas Eve meant no meat, no animal fat, and in stricter households no dairy either. Fish was permitted, which is a distinction with a long theological history rather than a nutritional one. On a peninsula with roughly 4,700 miles of coastline, that restriction was not a hardship. It was an invitation.

Then the rule changed. In 1966, Pope Paul VI issued the apostolic constitution Paenitemini, which loosened the universal obligations around fasting and abstinence and handed much of the discretion to national bishops' conferences. In practice, Christmas Eve abstinence stopped being required for most Catholics decades ago. The feast kept going anyway, which tells you it stopped being about obedience a long time ago and became about the table.

Nowhere provable, and that is the honest answer. The explanations you will hear are folk etymology offered after the fact: the seven sacraments, the seven days of creation, the seven hills of Rome, the seven deadly sins, the seven sorrows of Mary. Food historians and Italian American writers who have gone looking, including at Smithsonian Magazine, consistently find the phrase circulating in the United States rather than in Italy, and no primary source pinning the number to a doctrine. Treat any confident single answer as a nice story.

Here is the detail worth repeating at a dinner table: in Italy the count is not seven. Families cook nine, or eleven, or thirteen, or simply as many dishes as the household can afford and carry, and plenty cook three. The fixed seven is an American tidying-up of an Italian habit, in the same way that the origin story we untangled in why turkey ended up at the center of Thanksgiving turned out to be neater in retelling than in the record.

There is no canonical list, but across Campania, Calabria and the Italian American Northeast, the same dishes recur. These are the ones that show up on real tables, with what they taste like and where they belong.

If you are cooking or eating this meal for the first time, the useful thing to know is not the symbolism, it is the order and the timing. Cold dishes first, pasta in the middle, fried things last while they are hot.

Between roughly 1880 and 1924, about four million Italians emigrated to the United States, the overwhelming majority from the south and Sicily, according to the Library of Congress. They brought the vigil with them, and then something predictable happened. In Italy the meal was constrained by what the local market had. In Brooklyn, Providence and Philadelphia, immigrants had access to a wider fish market and, within a generation, more money.

So the meal expanded. Shrimp went from occasional to standard, lobster appeared, and a fasting menu quietly turned into the most extravagant dinner of the year. The name followed the abundance. Calling it a feast of seven fishes made sense for a family cooking seven courses, and it gave second and third generation Italian Americans a portable, countable version of a tradition their grandparents had never needed to name.

It is now embedded enough in American culture to have its own film (the 2019 comedy Feast of the Seven Fishes, set in West Virginia) and its own street festival in Fairmont, West Virginia. Meanwhile a Roman or Milanese friend may look genuinely puzzled when you ask them about it, because northern Italian Christmas Eve leans on tortellini in broth and, in Milan, on panettone. This is a southern tradition that became a national American one.

The default answer, and the right one, is a high-acid Italian white: Falanghina or Greco di Tufo from Campania, Vermentino from Sardinia or coastal Tuscany, Grillo or Catarratto from Sicily. Acidity is doing real work here, cutting through fried batter and rich eel across a meal that runs for hours. Rosé from Abruzzo (cerasuolo) handles the tomato-based dishes better than most whites.

If you want to push the pairing further, our piece on the cheese that makes an inexpensive bottle taste like a splurge explains the same acid-and-fat mechanics from the other direction. And if the whole spread sounds like more cooking than your December has room for, the shortcuts in our fast dinners that look like real effort cover the seafood pan-sauce technique that most of these dishes rely on.

Broadly, yes, with caveats. Oily fish, clams and mussels supply omega-3 fatty acids, iodine, selenium and unusually high levels of B12 and iron, which is part of why seafood-heavy eating patterns score well in the research we reviewed in our look at the evidence behind the Mediterranean diet. Salt cod is a different story: it is genuinely high in sodium even after soaking, so people watching blood pressure should treat it as an occasional dish. This is general information rather than personalized medical or dietary advice.

Two practical safety notes for anyone cooking it. Discard mussels and clams that stay shut after cooking or that are cracked beforehand, and buy live shellfish from a source that can tell you when it came in. Raw marinated anchovies should be made from fish that has been commercially frozen, which is the standard control for parasites in raw fish, as FDA seafood guidance sets out.

If you have never done this, skip the marathon. Make linguine alle vongole for four people on December 24 and see whether the room goes quiet. That is the whole tradition in one pan. Then tell us what your family actually cooks, and whether your count is seven, nine, thirteen, or a number nobody in the house has ever bothered to add up.