SOAPBOX: Dishful thinking
Download mp3 (5.71 MB)On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the the mic to listeners. For winter 2022, writers tackled the theme EATING CHRISTMAS.
Robrt Pela is currently writing for Phoenix Magazine (and backstage, scouring eBay for dishware).
“We could do salmon timbales and mussels in wine and butter,” my husband is saying. “If we did a cioppino, that would be three or four fishes in one entrée.”
We are planning our annual Feast of the Seven Fishes. Following a tradition we swiped from the Italians, we spend most of Dec. 24 preparing cod and catfish; albacore and anchovies. And quite a lot of time beforehand, discussing what the menu will be this year.
“How about Clams Casino?” he asks. “And fried smelts. You like fried smelts.”
I’m not really listening. I’m thinking about dishes.
“You’re not really listening,” he says. “You’re thinking about dishes.”
I am a dish queen. Young mothers, take note: If you tell your 5-year-old son that playing house is a bad idea, he might end up a 60-year-old with enough china to serve all of Yavapai County. I own more dishware than everyone I know ... combined.
I wasn’t raised with the seven fishes. My mother was. And hated Christmas Eve because it meant being trapped in the kitchen all day, forced by her older sisters to descale monkfish and decapitate eels.
“Have you ever disemboweled an octopus?” she asked me once when I was little. “No, you haven’t, because your mother isn’t a monster.”
Mom swore that when she was a grownup lady, rather than spending Christmas Eve stuffing a mackerel, she’d make a nice lasagna instead. But a decade ago, my husband and I were casting around for another annual holiday tradition. You know, because the weeks of shopping and cooking and baking and giftwrapping we already did every year somehow wasn’t enough.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes was perfect, because it required hours of discussion, a good deal of planning and shopping. And a lot of dishware.
“I was thinking the soup course on the green Harkerware, the salad on the Steubenville Plaid, and the entrée on the Vernonware chop plates,” I tell him.
“The subject is fishes,” my spouse replies. “Not dishes.”
He’s a patient man. He puts up with my obsession with Anchor Hocking and Franciscanware and claims not to be jealous of my Melmac. In return, I endure his endless photography of everything we eat.
Dec. 24 will come, and we will dine on squid ink pasta served in a Blue Ridge pottery lug bowl and pickled herring from a Taylor Smith Taylor monkey dish. But not before my husband has lovingly photographed them, lighting them just so, posing each as if it were a movie star and not a pan-fried dolphin fish.
And that night, we’ll look at my husband’s Hollywood portraits of what we’ve just eaten. But I won’t be thinking about how fortunate I am never to have been trapped in a kitchen with a dead octopus, or how tasty that arctic char had been. I’ll be thinking, “That swordfish looks like hell on the cobalt Fiestaware.”
But it’s OK. There’s always next year.
