We haven’t done the seven fishes since I was a very little kid. Like pizza, spaghetti with meatballs and sweeping the sidewalk, the Feast of the Seven Fishes is one of those traditions with roots in the old country but is primarily an Italian-American invention.

Mine was just the third generation born on US soil on my maternal grandfather’s side, the fourth on my grandmother’s — marrying a non-Italian would have been considered a mixed marriage in the 1940s when they wed. My grandmother and my noni, what Italians call their great-grandmothers, kept the vigil when I was small: an array of shrimp marinara with linguine and spicy red sauce; baccalá, or salted codfish with onions and crushed red pepper; eel; clams; fried smelt; scungili; maybe a puttanesca, I don’t know. Like I said, I was small.