How Italians Do Christmas
Ask an Italian family what they're having for Christmas dinner and you'll get a longer answer than you bargained for. Because there isn't one Christmas meal. There's Christmas Eve, there's Christmas Day, and there's the long afternoon that follows, and each of them has its own rules, its own dishes, and usually its own argument about how Nonna used to do it.
It's one of our favourite things about Italian food, and it's something our Italian cooks talk about often. So here's how it actually works, and how you might borrow a little of it for an Australian December.
Christmas Eve: the Feast of the Seven Fishes
Christmas Eve in Italy is la Vigilia, the vigil, and traditionally it's a day of abstinence, which means no meat. What sounds like a restriction turned into one of the great meals of the year.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes is exactly what it sounds like: seafood, course after course, shared slowly across a whole evening. Salt cod, or baccalà, is almost always there, prepared differently depending on which part of Italy you're in. So are prawns, clams, calamari, anchovies, marinated eel in some regions, and a pasta course with a seafood sauce.
Why seven? Nobody entirely agrees, which is very Italian. Some say the seven sacraments, some say the seven hills of Rome, some say seven days of creation. In parts of the south you'll find families serving nine, or eleven, or thirteen. The number matters less than the shape of the evening, which is a lot of small dishes, a lot of people, and no one leaving the table for hours.
Christmas Day: four courses, if you pace yourself
Christmas Day, Natale, is the day meat comes back, and the meal follows the traditional Italian order rather than a single centrepiece.
It opens with antipasti, cured meats, cheeses, olives, marinated vegetables, something crusty to go with it. Then the primo, the pasta course, and this is where the great baked dishes belong: lasagne, cannelloni, or in the south a rich baked pasta that's been in the oven since morning. In the north you're more likely to meet tortellini floating in broth.
Then the secondo, the roast, which might be capon, lamb, veal or pork depending on the region, served with a vegetable side rather than piled on the same plate. And finally dolci, the sweets, which is a category serious enough to need its own section.
The important thing to understand about the Italian Christmas table is that no single dish is expected to do all the work. It's a sequence, and everyone paces themselves accordingly. Or intends to.
Panettone, pandoro and the rest of the sweets
If one food says Christmas in Italy, it's panettone. It's a tall, domed sweet bread from Milan, made with a naturally leavened dough that's proved over a day or more, then studded with candied citrus peel and sultanas. Done properly it pulls apart in soft strands rather than slicing like a cake, and that texture is the whole point.
Italians don't usually serve it as a formal dessert. It sits on the table for days, eaten in slices with coffee in the morning, with a glass of something sweet in the evening, and in plenty of households it's still being finished off well into January. A common trick is to warm a slice slightly, which wakes the butter up beautifully.
Its great rival is pandoro, from Verona, star-shaped, plainer, no fruit, dusted heavily with icing sugar. Ask which is better and you'll start a fight. There's also torrone, a nougat of honey, egg white and almonds, and struffoli, little fried dough balls piled into a mound, drenched in honey and scattered with sprinkles, which is Naples at its most joyful. In Siena you'll find panforte, dense with nuts, spice and candied fruit, closer to Australia's idea of a Christmas cake than anything else on the list.
And then there's tiramisu, which isn't traditionally a Christmas dish at all, but has quietly become one in plenty of families because it's made ahead, it's cold, and everyone wants it.
An Italian Christmas in an Australian summer
Here's the part imported Christmas content never deals with. Most of these traditions were built for a Milanese winter. In Australia it's thirty degrees, the cricket's on, and nobody wants to stand over a four-hour roast with the oven radiating into an already warm kitchen.
The good news is that Italian Christmas adapts to heat better than almost any other tradition, because so much of it is designed to be made ahead and shared at room temperature.
Lean into Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. Seafood, shared slowly, cold or barely warm, is a far better fit for an Australian summer than a roast. Prawns, marinated calamari, something with anchovies, a seafood pasta, and you've essentially got the Vigilia with an Australian accent.
Keep the antipasti generous and cold. Cured meats, cheeses, marinated vegetables, good bread. It looks like effort and requires none.
Let a baked pasta be the centrepiece instead of a roast. A lasagne or cannelloni feeds a crowd, can be made a day ahead, and only needs the oven for a stretch rather than the whole afternoon.
Finish with something cold. Tiramisu, gelato, or panettone with a bowl of berries and cream, which is a very Australian compromise and an extremely good one.
Eat late. The Italian habit of starting dinner well after the heat has gone out of the day is one worth stealing.
How to do it without cooking for three days
If the sequence sounds lovely but the workload doesn't, this is exactly what our Italian range is for. Every dish is handmade in small batches by local home cooks, cooking authentic family recipes, then freshly frozen, so the cooking is done and the table still looks like somebody spent the morning on it.
To start, Davide's Sicilian arancini, crumbed and golden, and Nat's garlic parmesan ciabatta, which disappears faster than anything else on the table.
For the middle of the table, a lasagne, Davide's traditional, Rebecca's chicken pesto or Maurice's Vegetarian Lasagne if you are feeding non-meat eaters. Paolo's pumpkin, ricotta and Italian sausage cannelloni does the same job with a bit more of an occasion about it.
To finish, Davide's tiramisu, which he makes the classic way, and which has the considerable advantage of being served cold.
Meals arrive freshly frozen and can be heated quickly, so the only real decision left is what time everyone's sitting down.
Browse the full Italian range, or see the whole Christmas menu if you're feeding a crowd this year.
Buon Natale, and buon appetito.
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