Czech Christmas carp

Christmas Eve dinner usually starts with fish soup made from the carp's head and tail. Then comes the carp itself. It is cut across into pieces, breaded and fried in oil or lard, and served with a cold potato salad bound with mayonnaise and pickled vegetables. Beer or white wine goes with it. A carp scale goes under each plate, and some people keep one in their wallet through the year for money.

Eating fish at Christmas is recorded in the Czech lands from the 17th century, and ordinary people mostly ignored it for a long time. The carp became the holiday dish of the urban middle class in the 19th century, with Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová's cookbook as the usual witness, and it reached villages and poorer homes only after the First World War. Fried carp became the favourite after the Second World War, partly because farmed carp was cheap. Much of the carp comes from the pond farms of South Bohemia. Rybářství Třeboň, which calls itself the largest freshwater fish producer in the country, says its Třeboňský kapr has carried an EU protected geographical indication since 2007.

Through Advent, sellers set up tubs of live carp on the streets, and buyers either take one home alive or have it killed and cleaned at the stand. A carp kept in a bathtub for days often suffers from the trip and the water, and the Czech Wikipedia argues that killing it at the stand is kinder. Some people set their carp free in a river, and fish experts advise against that, since a stressed farmed fish usually dies and can carry disease to wild ones. Food inspectors watch the street sales.