{"id":15555,"date":"2018-11-28T19:32:36","date_gmt":"2018-11-29T00:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=15555"},"modified":"2018-11-28T19:32:36","modified_gmt":"2018-11-29T00:32:36","slug":"the-ultimate-frutti-di-mare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/the-ultimate-frutti-di-mare\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ultimate Frutti di Mare"},"content":{"rendered":"

December 2018 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

What a way to stretch out the holidays! Families and legends<\/strong> converge on the Italian Heritage Center<\/strong> to share the ultimate<\/em> feast of Southern Italy.<\/span><\/h3>\n

By Sofia Voltin<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Dec18-Frutti-di-Mare\"T<\/span>he Feast of the Seven Fishes is seasoned with the past.<\/span> On January 18, working with generations of local families, Portland\u2019s Italian Heritage Center hosts a traditional Festa dei sette pesci<\/em>, an Italian-American dinner showcasing seven different seafood dishes. It commemorates the wait, or the Vigilia di Natale<\/em>, for the midnight 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<\/em> has been invited to eavesdrop.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe tried one year to do a Christmas dinner [featuring dishes such as lasagna], but it didn\u2019t work. Everyone wanted the fish!\u201d says Carmela Dalfonso Reali, president of Italian Heritage Center. Carmela\u2019s sister, Marianne Reali, was the first female president of the IHC. The sisters\u2019 maiden name is Dalfonso. Both married two brothers\u2014the Realis. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur members liked it, but they said they\u2019d rather have the fish because they don\u2019t get it otherwise,\u201d Marianne says. \u201cThese kids today, a lot of them don\u2019t make it anymore. A main course for the dinner, and a real Italian one, is baccal\u00e0. Basically, everybody eats it for Christmas.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBaccal\u00e0 is salted, dried fish,\u201d Jim DiBiase, chairman of the Cultural Committee, says. \u201cWhen it\u2019s raw, you can almost see through it. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy father traveled to the U.S. in the early 1900s from Lettomanoppello. Most of the Italian [immigrants] were men, and they expected to return to Italy. Some of them went back yearly, some of them went back at different times\u2026But he stayed, and most stayed, even though they\u2019d initially intended to earn enough money and then go back. [My dad] was a stonecutter. The Italian word for it is scalpellino<\/em>. He came to Stonington, Maine, and he worked in the quarries.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

DiBiase\u2019s wife, Francesca, is a cousin of the DiMillos. \u201cMy 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 Sunday, their mother sent them down to my mother\u2019s house, she hadn\u2019t been in America very long, to help her with the children. They would also help her learn English. All the neighbors were helpful. Weren\u2019t they nice to the immigrants back then?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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\u2019d run under the hoses, and all the doors would be open.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/span>ssunta F. Savage, a native of Calabria, Italy, moved to Scarborough with her husband Jess Savage 30 years ago. \u201cMy family\u2019s Christmas gift is baccal\u00e0 stew. It\u2019s made of dried cod with tomato sauce, potatoes, onion, garlic and parsley. It\u2019s what we have every Christmas Eve. The recipe is from Catanzaro in Calabria, where I was born.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Gina Di Pietrantonio Ferrante, a Portlander by way of Lettomanoppello of Abruzzo, has another take on the Italian Christmas Eve dish. \u201cCalabria 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\u2019d use that. In my house, we ate a lot of legumes and baccal\u00e0. We had a soup with chickpeas, red sauce, and baccal\u00e0. Baccal\u00e0 is very versatile because it absorbs a lot of flavors.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A<\/span>nother huge favorite is \u201cthe calamari,\u201d Marianne Reali says. Whether it\u2019s served as a salad, fried, or stuffed, it seems every family has its take on cooking up some squid. \u201cI have a special calamari salad recipe we make for this dinner all the time.\u201d The taste \u201cbrings me closer to my grandparents, especially my Calabrian grandmother. I tweak it with jalape\u00f1o peppers, chi-chi beans (roasted chickpeas), and roasted peppers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne dish that stands out in my memory is called Linguini Alice,\u201d Jay Scala of East Deering says. His grandmother hails from Naples. \u201cIt\u2019s an anchovy sauce. When you cook it, it turns brown along with all the linguini. When we were kids, we called it dirty macaroni. We also had a baccal\u00e0 salad, a shrimp sauce, and squid sauce, We loved them all, but all year we looked forward to dirty macaroni.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

These tastes of Southern Italy are presents to the New World, many stemming from the massive immigration of Italians to the United States at the turn of the last century. \u201cA lot of these traditions started because we used whatever we had,\u201d says Ferrante. \u201cCall it peasant food if you like. If you go down to the roots, everything was very simple. Embellishing it with different flavors inspired the magic.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Shared times and love of family deepen many a sauce. The rougher the situation, the more profound the inspiration.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the big immigration surge came in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Italy was impoverished,\u201d DiBiase says. \u201cYou can\u2019t imagine how poor it was. One of the stories from that time is that the southern Italian peasants took plaster off the walls to mix with their bread dough to make their bread last. That\u2019s what drove the immigration. And that\u2019s what we all mean when we say peasant food.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately, adding plaster into bread dough didn\u2019t stick in Italian traditions. But if you think turning a thrifty dish into a celebrated delicacy doesn\u2019t resonate with Maine, think of lobster (once used as fertilizer!). The storied past of Italian immigration to Portland is celebrated every day in the Forest City. But especially so on the night of January 18. As DiBiase says, \u201cIt\u2019s more than just food and the dish. It\u2019s the thought and the tradition.\u201d <\/span>n<\/span><\/p>\n

Tickets are $35 for IHC members and $40 for
\nnon-members. 772-2500.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

December 2018
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