Posted on 12/25/2023 12:24:00 AM PST by nickcarraway
Auguri di Buon Natale! I drive past Casteldaccia all the time on my way to Palermo and have visited it several times. It’s a beautiful little village. I know the bread you speak of - it’s insanely good! If you get over here for a visit let me know and we’ll get together!
Definitely try to make the trip back. Don't know if you've seen Sicilia but it's stunning. As folks here say, Sicily is what mainland Italy was like 50 years ago. Very traditional, very Old School in a good way. My wife's a very hip Brit from East London but she really loves the "Old School" vibe here.
If you hop over and get to Sicily give me a shout and we'll have a nice glass or two of Nero D'Avola.
Yeah, the food here is just nuts.
Well cooked calamari shouldn’t be like that. It should be tender. Before baking it you have to sauté it in olive oil and salted water until it softens. Then layer it in a baking dish with sauce or lemon- breadcrumb mixture. Same for fried calamari - sauté to tenderize first, then coat, then deep fry. The best! But yeah, I’ve had it like you described and its inedible like that.
I hate fish. But I love Italian food. I’m conflicted.
On a Friday my street smells like wonderfully-seasoned frying fish. As I walk home it makes my knees weak because it smells so damn good!
Grazie mille on the invite.
If I can get past the novel seizures induced by COVID and fly again, you will be seeing me at your door.
:)
Thanks! I don’t know if it will happen, money is the big obstacle. My brother and some of my cousins did a tour of Sicily back in August. It was rush rush rush all the way thru. They DID visit Casteldaccia but didn’t get to spend much time there.
My wife visited relatives in Sambuca back in the 70s, before we got together.
She said her pants wouldn’t fit by the time she got back home. All she did was eat eat eat the whole time.
She has a cousin who still lives there. She did Lorraine Bracco’s hair when Ms Bracco did the TV series on the Home and Garden Channel about renovating a house she bought for a dollar. Her cousin was on screen in a few crowd shots.
It would be amazing to visit.
Fasts were in fact moved to the Saturday before. Here are the rules from the 1880s (see p. 19):
https://archive.org/details/manualofprayersf00wood/page/18/mode/2up
In any case, I mentioned the vigil fasts because that general rule is the main reason for the Christmas Eve fast. Sundays excepted, yes you are correct, but it still applied most years. The Friday fast that the author mentions only covers a fraction of Christmas Eves.
As we presumably both know, the 1917 Code of Canon Law did away with anticipating a fast, should a vigil fall on a Sunday.
A tradition invented in America, just like serving spaghetti and meatballs together and eating something called “chicken parmigiana.” Fish is served on Christmas Eve throughout Europe including Italy. This “seven fishes” thing never existed in Italy proper.
Back in the day, Advent was a period of fasting, meaning no meat, milk/butter/cheese, or eggs. Fish would have been served on Christmas Eve because it was still Advent, and because nobody would want to eat fish when the twelve days of Christmas began on the 25th. On Christmas day everyone got to dig into the stockpiled milk/butter/cheese, and eggs, and all the game meat from the animals and birds killed, but not eaten, during Advent.
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