D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8 3 5 Hungry Eye clockwise from top left: adobe stock; Daniela Nokes mogwaisoup.com; adobe; thewoksoflife.com; melangery.com; adobe Frutti di Mare By Sofia Voltin What a way to stretch out the holidays! Families and legends converge on the Italian Heritage Center to share the ultimate feast of Southern Italy. The Feast of the Seven Fishes is seasoned with the past. On January 18, working with generations of local families, Port- land’s Italian Heritage Center hosts a tra- ditional Festa dei sette pesci, an Italian- American dinner showcasing seven differ- ent seafood dishes. It commemorates the wait, or the Vigilia di Natale, for the mid- night birth of the baby Jesus. Each year, a committee collaborates to form a menu of traditional dishes passed down through their families in, predominantly, Southern Italy. This year, Portland Monthly has been invited to eavesdrop. “We tried one year to do a Christmas dinner [featuring dishes such as lasagna], but it didn’t work. Everyone wanted the fish!” says Carmela Dalfonso Reali, presi- dent of Italian Heritage Center. Carmela’s sister, Marianne Reali, was the first female president of the IHC. The sisters’ maiden name is Dalfonso. Both married two broth- ers—the Realis. “Our members liked it, but they said they’d rather have the fish because they don’t get it otherwise,” Marianne says. “These kids today, a lot of them don’t make it anymore. A main course for the dinner, and a real Italian one, is baccalà. Basically, everybody eats it for Christmas.” “Baccalà is salted, dried fish,” Jim DiB- iase, chairman of the Cultural Commit- tee, says. “When it’s raw, you can almost see through it. “My father traveled to the U.S. in the ear- ly 1900s from Lettomanoppello. Most of the Italian [immigrants] were men, and they ex- pected to return to Italy. Some of them went back yearly, some of them went back at dif- ferent times…But he stayed, and most stayed, even though they’d initially intended to earn enough money and then go back. [My dad] was a stonecutter. The Italian word for it is scalpellino. He came to Stonington, Maine, and he worked in the quarries.” DiBiase’s wife, Francesca, is a cousin of the DiMillos. “My father and mother both came from Italy. My father came in 1922, ten years before my mother. He traveled a lot. He was a very good cabinet maker, and he worked throughout the States. His name was Luigi DiMillo. [Tony] DiMillo is my cousin. They had a lot of girls. Every Sun- day, their mother sent them down to my mother’s house, she hadn’t been in Ameri- ca very long, to help her with the children. They would also help her learn English. All the neighbors were helpful. Weren’t they nice to the immigrants back then? “It was all immigrant Italians on our street, and [neighbors] would come down at night and visit us, drink homemade wine. All the food would come out. The mothers would nurse the babies, we’d run under the hoses, and all the doors would be open.” Assunta F. Savage, a native of Calabria, Italy, moved to Scarborough with her hus- band Jess Savage 30 years ago. “My family’s Christmas gift is baccalà stew. It’s made of dried cod with tomato sauce, potatoes, on- ion, garlic and parsley. It’s what we have ev- ery Christmas Eve. The recipe is from Cat- anzaro in Calabria, where I was born.” Gina Di Pietrantonio Ferrante, a Port- lander by way of Lettomanoppello of Abru- zzo, has another take on the Italian Christ- mas Eve dish. “Calabria is all fish, but not all of Italy is on the water. A lot of places, like my village, are on mountains, so you can only get fish a certain day of the week. If there was dried fish, then you’d use that. In my house, we ate a lot of legumes and baccalà. We had a soup with chickpeas, red T h e U l t i m at e