Christmas

sc002963a801.jpgThough everyone thinks their family is odd, mine was definitely unique, at least in my neighborhood. Both my parents are only children, which made holiday celebrations a little somber since there were no siblings or cousins to play with or share the scrutiny of my grandparents’ expectations.

Plus, my mother is French and my father is Polish, which, in those days (the early 60s) was quite a bone of contention with both sides.  It was true love (43 years and counting), so they decided to allow their “crazy” kids to get hitched, but none of them were ever truly happy about it.

The fact that my parents had four kids in 6 years alleviated a little of the enmity and focused their parents' attention on us.

Being a male-dominated world back then, we always went to my Polish grandparents house for Christmas Eve.  It was all adults. My siblings and I were the only kids. Since we spent every day of our lives together, we were uninterested and incapable of entertaining each other. We were also expected to behave like little ladies and gentlemen. Not hard since there wasn’t much to play with at my grandparents house. My French grandmother bitched about it every year and often threatened not to attend – even though she couldn’t cook and had no room to host an event.

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pickled-herring.jpgMy family, while I grew up in Iowa in the 1970's,  had no traditions save one.  For 364 dinner days of the year, it was my mother who performed culinary magic at home.  (Today her dinners would be heralded by food critics as tempura-style but back then it was just “frying floured foods in fat”.)   Her lipid of choice was Crisco but on Christmas Eve the can of Crisco was put away and my father took out the stew pots.

My father, who was a local politician,  positively beamed with pride at his singular culinary contribution for the year which was an appealing to no one constituency menu of homemade chili, homemade oyster stew, and store bought pickled herring.  He had taken shrapnel at the Battle of the Bulge in WWII and perhaps this affected his judgment but nevertheless he fancied himself a gourmand and this menu was his pride and joy.

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kcc6_candy_canes.jpgCandy Canes

Legend has it that in 1670, the choirmaster at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany handed out sugar sticks among his young singers to keep them quiet during the long Living Creche ceremony. In honor of the occasion, he had the candies bent into shepherds' crooks. In 1847, a German-Swedish immigrant named August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, decorated a small blue spruce with paper ornaments and candy canes. It wasn't until the turn of the century that the red and white stripes and peppermint flavors became the norm.

In the 1920s, Bob McCormack began making candy canes as special Christmas treats for his children, friends and local shopkeepers in Albany, Georgia. It was a laborious process – pulling, twisting, cutting and bending the candy by hand. It could only be done on a local scale.

In the 1950s, Bob's brother-in-law, Gregory Keller, a Catholic priest, invented a machine to automate candy cane production. Packaging innovations by the younger McCormacks made it possible to transport the delicate canes on a large scale. Although modern technology has made candy canes accessible and plentiful, they've not lost their purity and simplicity as a traditional holiday food.

From The National Confectioners Association

 

ImageI’m nervous. I’m not sleeping well. The greatest challenge of my life is one month away and I have yet to start planning it: Christmas dinner. Everything will be riding on it. Not just my self-respect; the respect of my gender – every man who has ever said to his stay at home wife, “Hey, I’d take your job in a minute.” Well, she gave it to me. It’s all mine. And now I’ve got to deliver. Put a stunning meal on the table this Christmas; one that lets my hard working, career-driven wife know she married the right …well …wife.

Let me be frank. I’ve survived these last few months on nothing but moxie, a crock-pot, and a copy of Cooking for Idiots. And now I’m staring at one hard cold fact: not only have I never cooked a Christmas dinner, I can’t recall having eaten one. I’m a Jew: a Jew, who pompously volunteered to cook for his Cuban wife and her family on their most important Holiday of the year. What the hell was I thinking? If some couch potato wants to firm up, you don’t tell him to enter a marathon. You tell him to walk a little, then jog a bit, see if he can eventually work himself up to a mile. Yet here I am, a couch potato running a marathon, a culinary novice planning the mother of all meals: Christmas Dinner. Yikes!

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ricottapancakesJeff and I have been starving ourselves for the past few days. Well, not actually starving. We did have our morning coffee. Oh, and I sneaked in a couple of double chocolate pomegranate cookies yesterday. But those don't count. I was recipe testing.

Why are we starving ourselves? Because on Christmas Eve night, we will be enjoying a traditional Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes. That means fried calamari, fried smelts, and crab cakes. Snail salad, bacala (a dried, salted fish), and shrimp cocktail. (Those are just the starters.) Then comes the pasta. Two types of pasta, actually -- one with mixed seafood including shrimp, scallops, and lobster; the other with olive oil, clam sauce, and parsley. Then we'll finish with jumbo stuffed shrimp and garlicky broccoli rabe.

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