You’re absolutely correct. Avellino. For some reason Abruzzo is stuck in my head. The Bevilacqua family was and still is quite prominent there. Many of their relatives came to the Boston area as well. Lombardi, Capone, Pizzano… It’s fun to read the genealogy.
I can’t believe I’ve never been to Puritan, though we’ve been to other restaurants in the same area. This year I’m going to make the pate recipe from the Food & Wine site,
I am really keen to go to Abruzzo, which actually has a tremendous amount of culinary variety within the province. I just ate pasta from Abruzzo this evening, because they make some of the best in Italy. My recollection of shopping in the Arthur Ave area of the Bronx is that Abruzzese operated some of the best stores.
I love studying the emigration patterns from Italy to the US. It shows up in some regional differences in Italian-American cooking too. You can find a lot of recognizable twists on Northern Italian cooking around San Francisco that you don’t see along the eastern seaboard, where so many southern Italians settled. But most of all I now recognize the names of Italian towns where I’ve been when I’m introduced to Italian Americans named Joe DiLucca or Anna Saluzzo. If you haven’t already I hope you get to visit Torre le Nocelle. Looks totally charming.
http://ristorantelacasablanca.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/torrelnocelle.jpg
When I was in Italy, people ate fish and seafood, but certainly didn’t bother with seven fishes. The supper could even include smoked salmon and other fishy things not thought of as “Italian”.
I have never been. My folks went to visit grandma Anna’s village. It is very beautiful with a large important fortress but we have no living connection to relatives. I have been through northern Italy a bunch but the abruzzo and the south are on my list of places I really want to go, and eat everything. I really miss Arthur Ave but mom usually hooks me up when I go home.
Heck, I’m pretty sure Red Lobster is closed on Christmas Eve, or at least they close by 5 or 6 pm. I’ve driven around our area on Christmas Eve after 9pm, and the only lights on are at an occassional convenience store.
We have never hung Ukrainian eggs on our tree. My grandparents are from the old country. My grandmother never learned how to make the Easyer eggs. She was the eldest of five girls. She had to work in the fields and never was taught how to dye those eggs. We do habe pyrohy every Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving.
Our household (2 young adult men plus mum & dad) tends to go dry and vegetarian on Christmas Eve to give our livers and digestions a day off. In the few days before the 24th this year we’ll have had pheasant, venison, ham, rillettes etc. on a daily basis, so lunch might be roasted garlicky mushrooms on ciabatta toast, with the Chunky Bean and Vegetable soup from p172 of The Soup Bible for supper.
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Great pic . I wish I was there .
Even my tiny village alimentari has smoked salmon today, and they might have salted cod (or is that Easter). I think Sicilians actually do the whole seven fishes (not everybody, but that is THE traditional feast for Sicilians) but I could be wrong. I’ve read that like panettone, it’s a local tradition that went national, but while I see panettone everywhere during Christmas alongside purely local cakes, I rarely see or hear of anybody gearing up to do sette pesci for Xmas eve.
As much as anybody will listen to me, I really urge people to go to the ancestral towns and villages in Italy, even if they no longer think they have relatives there and even ahead of the great sights like Venice, Florence etc. They may not last forever and they are all amazing places, in particular if you are interested in food, because there is so much small farming activity, and there are so many purely local specialties that are next to impossible to find elsewhere. You personally might end up recognizing flavors and dishes that your family made that you hadn’t since seen. Plus, Italy is generally quite beautiful everywhere in the country., and has a whole different feeling in the places not much visited by foereign tourists. Looking at the picture, fair bet that if Torre le Nocelle were in Tuscany, it would be swamped with tour buses. Very pretty.
Wouldn’t surprise me if it is covered in snow today.
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We typically have a smorgasbord on Christmas Eve. It’s not seven fishes, but we do include some fish. We also have kids coming, so we try to think of what they will eat as well. So far I am preparing:
Eggnog, using the pasturized eggs since my Mom is 85
Norwegian Glogg, which contains Everclear and port wine. (very potent!)
U-10 shrimp cocktail
Lobster salad
Pickled herring
Tuna
Pigs in blanket
Danish blue cheese and crackers
Mini quiche lorraine
Artichoke dip and crackers
Cocktail meatballs
Cheddar cheese and pineapple
Olives
Nutbread
For dessert we will have traditional Norwegian cookies that we all helped make: sandbakkelse, which is an almond cookie pressed into a tin and baked. We will also have krumkake, which is a thin cookie rolled while it is still hot into a cone shape. If I have things together that night, I’ll make some cardamom whipped cream to put inside them.
Once everyone arrives, we’ll eat and then we will open our gifts. We like to drag it out, opening only one gift at at time. This gives us plenty of time to continue to nosh and drink through the evening.
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It is interesting, many of the family recipes are distinctly of abruzzo, my uncle’s wife is of Sicilian origin and her family’s food is very different, excellent IMO but my grandmother (her MIL) always had something to say 
most of my family did not stay in New York I believe most of my great grandfathers family (de Campania) went to Toronto and the Abruzzese to LA I believe.
I am very fascinated by my ancestral town a severely beautiful place with a rather violent history as compared to its present day sleepy village - I cannot imagine what it took to leave somewhere so beautiful and ancient, life must have been very hard there in the early 1900s but I know grandma Anna never wanted to leave and never stopped missing her village (or the boyfriend she left behind) thankfully she brought her cooking skills. Her brother and sister in law returned to Teramo to retire.
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What a beautiful town. It looks familiar somehow, but I can’t place it.
Here in Montréal there are many people from gli Abruzzi (now the regions of Abruzzo and Molise). Often most of a village tended to emigrate to the same destination, in migration chains.
oh I meant to post the wiki link
Oh, I love these! I may have made fun of my in-laws up-thread for Red Lobster tendencies, but I hold their krumkake, which my coastal-residing self had never had before, in the highest regard.
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I can imagine.
Young Italians are still leaving such towns, and even Italian cities now, migrating to Germany, Austrailia, Ireland, Switzerland. I would say that of all the people I know in Italy with young adult children, at least half, if not more, those children have gone abroad for purely economic reasons.
Sometimes the migration “chains” revolved around skill sets in demand – like anchovy fishing, mining, sheep raising/textile production (to Latin America)
And there’s one clue why perhaps some folks left… 
I believe I read somewhere that Abruzzo has more national parks than any other region of Italy partly because huge sections were never settled by anybody for centuries because of the frequency of earthquakes.
My family is completely watered down, ethnically. Not having any Christmas food traditions of our own, we choose to make tamales at our Christmas Eve gathering. It’s a good dish for a crowd to make and eat. I make a pork cochinita filling for the meat-eaters and humitas for the vegetarians.
Grazie!
Stage scolastico Teramo - Montréal:
http://www.comune.teramo.it/index.php?id=48&itemid=634
There are of course natural factors (earthquakes, difficult - if beautiful - terrain) but social ones as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L’Aquila_earthquake
And yes, migration chains were also fuelled by the skills migrants had, not just demand for so-called “unskilled” labour (which still demanded some skills and competencies). As a foodie board, we will certainly remember winemakers, cheesemakers, pasta makers, skilled butchers and sausage makers, and many others, as well as farmers expert in growing certain crops.
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Most of all, let us not forget Ettore Boiardi of Piacenza, Italy, better known as Chef Boy-ar-dee (whom I thought as a child was French).
It’s true there is very little opportunity in these places even now, and sadly in Italy as a whole - with the connectivity of the world today it seems a little different as it is a bit easier to go home again to visit or retire. American small towns and cities struggle as well but they don’t have the same historical gravitas. Civitella survives only for the museum and fortezza tourists. Certainly from a prosperity level my family did well to leave. Transience is the way of the modern world I suppose.
L’Aquila was tragic both in its occurrence and the reconstruction. In fact the town of my great-grandfather in Campania was almost entirely destroyed sometime in the 1950s although his own house remains and is owned by a cousin
My family were tailors, and while fine Italian suits were definitely a nice add to NYC, I am more thankful that the Italians and other immigrant groups brought their culinary skills with them to the new world because it has created a really rich culinary landscape and entirely new fusion cuisines by combining old-world traditions and flavors with new wold bounty.
Things like the feast of the 7 fishes and the Italian-American “sunday sauce” are as much a celebration of the affluence obtained in the new world as a look to tradition.
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