Pizza on Christmas Eve? That's how we do it in the Carta family! Andrew and Thomas below will tell you how it measured up to the European Pizza Challenge, as we celebrated Christmas Eve in Strasbourg, France. But Dad is going to hijack this installment of the European Pizza Challenge for a segway into family history.
How does the Carta pizza measure up?
Traditions are important. They provide families with a sense of home, wherever they may be. So while on this 9 month adventure away from our home in San Diego, we have tried very hard to keep traditions that give our boys a feeling that we are not so far from home, even though we are.
We have a few special ones that we try to keep around Christmas. We read the Bible passages about Jesus' birth. We make pizza on Christmas Eve. We make fried dough with sugar from the leftover pizza dough on Christmas morning. And the boys expectantly wait for the scavenger hunt that Santa always surprises them with.
I have fond memories of making pizza every Christmas Eve while I was growing up at my Italian grandma's house. Scacciata (ska-chatta), a stuffed pizza with potato, spinach, or broccoli, was standard fare. The kids would also make their own pizzas loaded with cheeses, olives, sausage or anything else they wanted. My dad always had his own anchovy only pizza. And cousins, aunts, uncles and friends abounded in my Grandma Mary's home for the celebration.
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| A Traditional Potato Pie, in Form,. if not in Visage |
Last year, a friend who had joined us for our Christmas Eve pizza, asked, "Does this pizza tradition happen everywhere in Italy?" I didn't know - was this just a Carta thing? I suspected that it had deeper roots, but I didn't know for certain. This year, I decided to find out and my digging led me to discover a neat history of my Italian and Sicilian heritage.
My uncle John mentioned that during his childhood, he remembered that my grandma's sister, my great-aunt Jasper Salamone, from Middletown, Connecticut, made the best Christmas Eve pizza. I reached out to her children who still lived in the area to see if they still celbrated this way and this was my cousin's reply:
Yes we do , I have Jasper's recipe for the dough and I make scaciata it's potato pie and spinach pie, the cod fish, the calamari and the whole thing. My nieces and my sister's family join us. Our door is open to any one.I cook for two days and love every minute. Merry Christmas to all. Cousin Rosetta & JoJo
Awesome! So it was more than just a Carta thing! But as I searched for the word "scaciata" - which I had no idea how to spell before - remember, it's pronounced Ska-Chatta - I came across this wikipedia page and one paragraph down, what do I find, but this heading "Scacciata in Middletown, Connecticut" - This was a surprise!
It turns out that at the end of the 19th century, Middletown, CT was the destination for people from Sicily. So many, in fact, that 2/3 of the population of Middletown at one point were Sicilian. In 1931, the local Sicilian craftsmen completed St. Sebastian church in Middletown - an homage in name and construction to St. Sebastian's in Melilli, Siciliy. This was the first Italian parish in the area.
This tidbit of information puts some context into a story my dad told me. Growing up in the 1940s in Middletown, our and other Italian families would walk across the city to go to church at
St. Sebastian's on Sunday morning, even though there was an Irish Catholic church just around the block from their houses. There was a huge amount of Italians community pride in the church and every family likely knew or contributed to its construction.
St. Sebastian's on Sunday morning, even though there was an Irish Catholic church just around the block from their houses. There was a huge amount of Italians community pride in the church and every family likely knew or contributed to its construction.
So, back to the pizza. I now knew how the word was spelled, discovered scacciata arrived to our family via Middletown, and those original immigrants brought their traditional cuisine from Sicily.
Digging further, I found a number of recipe sites which indicated that scacciata is still a typical Christmas Eve meal in both Sicily and Sicilian communities. So it was not only a Carta tradition, but a Middletown tradition, and a Sicilian tradition! The circle was almost complete. Now, why on Christmas Eve?
This link from Sanpellegrino had a nice description of the history of the tie between Christmas Eve and Scacciata. Below is an excerpt from their site.
Digging further, I found a number of recipe sites which indicated that scacciata is still a typical Christmas Eve meal in both Sicily and Sicilian communities. So it was not only a Carta tradition, but a Middletown tradition, and a Sicilian tradition! The circle was almost complete. Now, why on Christmas Eve?
This link from Sanpellegrino had a nice description of the history of the tie between Christmas Eve and Scacciata. Below is an excerpt from their site.
Unofficial sources claim that the scacciata appeared on Sicilian tables around the 17th century, as the basic dish of peasant communities.The recipe was handed down in rural areas during the Kingdom of Sicily and during the period of the Two Sicilies before it landed on urban tables a century later. According to some popular accounts, in 1763 the prince of Paternò wanted a scacciata for his Christmas table, and it seems that since then it has been a traditional dish for celebrating Christmas. In Sicily today, the scacciata is very widespread; it is not made industrially. Once again a poor and simple Sicilian dish becomes rich food, whose flavours turn into unforgettable emotional experiences.Food fit for a king, a staple of the peasants. Sounds appropriate for our savior, Jesus Christ, King of Kings, but born to humble beginnings on this evening.
Discovering that our tradition of Christmas Eve pizza goes far deeper than just my grandma was a wonderful way to connect back to my family's roots and my Sicilian heritage. And while I'm sure we will continue making new traditions and morphing the old ones, there's something very satisfying about feeling like you have deep roots into a community that has similar values and a shared sense of joy of eating a simple thing like pizza on Christmas Eve.
So the next time you are in our neighborhood on Christmas Eve, come join us for some yummy scacciata - there is always room at the inn.
Here are some nice scacciata recipes I found doing this research. I'd give you mine, but like most of my cooking, I go by feel and not so much by quantities, which makes it difficult to share.
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