A Writing Journey

(Thank you to Lainie and the teachers in our weekly writing group for this prompt to slice about a family recipe. It brought me back to an annual tradition in my family — one that my 86-year-old mother still practices — of making tomato sauce. I’m grateful that in my 20s I decided to document this tradition with a photo essay and video documentary. I treasure those memories as much as I do the tomato sauce!) 

When it became difficult to manoeuvre around my family’s cold room because it was filled with bushels of tomatoes, I knew what was coming.

Every year, almost like clockwork in the last week of August, came the trip to the farm to pick tomatoes. My parents liked to pick them directly from the plants themselves. No trusting someone else to choose the ripest, roundest, firmest of plum tomatoes. There’s an art to picking the right ones — ones that would be used for making our family tomato sauce.

The bushels of tomatoes — sometimes upwards of a dozen bushels — would be stored in our house’s cold room in the basement until the big day arrived, the day when the tomato-making process began. 

As kids, my sister and I were always recruited to help along the assembly line. It began with my mother boiling a big pot of water (imagine a witches’ cauldron for brewing a magical concoction in a traditional children’s fairytale). The tomatoes were steamed first. This made the skin easier to peel off and the innards softer to crush. 

My father then had the job of taking those tomatoes and cutting them into pieces. Pieces that would be easier to pass through a tomato grinding machine that would separate the skin and seeds from the tomato pulp — the liquid gold that would be the base of the Panzera sauce.

At different times in the day (yes, this was a whole day affair from the wee hours of the morning until sunset) my sister and I would be called to participate in the methodical ritual — maybe to cut up some tomatoes or push those same pieces through the grinder. We were always aexcited as the day began, but by noon, we were both itching to get back to more important things like riding our bikes around the neighborhood or talking on the phone with our friends.

But my parents were not having it — we had to be all in, one hundred per cent, if this culinary work of love was going to be accomplished in one day.

As the juice flowed out of the grinding machine, it accumulated in a deep bucket. Once full, that juice was then transferred to the same cauldron (that held the witches’ brew) where it was brought to a boil. As the water evaporated, the juice turned into sauce.

My job was to stir. My mother made a custom stirring instrument for the occasion by tying a wooden spatula to the end of a long wooden rod. This would, of course, prevent anyone’s arms from getting scalded by the heat of the sauce. As I stirred and stirred and stirred, my little arm would tire. My mom, who was helping out at various stations, would notice me slacking.

“Com’on Giovanna, keep stirring!”

Once mom decided — and only she decided — that the stirring was complete, the sauce could be transferred to the bottles that contained a sprig of fresh basil, grown from my parents’ vegetable garden.

The final step: pouring the sauce through a funnel into each jar. That was mom’s job and it took extreme precision to prevent any spillage. I would watch, amazed at how she knew exactly when to stop pouring so the sauce would not overflow.

There were, it seemed to me as a child, millions of jars to fill. In reality, there were likely about a hundred. My mother would seal them and then my father would transport them back to our basement cold room, where the bushel baskets were now lying empty. The bottles of tomato sauce would line the shelves all the way to the back. 

The sauce we made that day would last our family (who ate pasta at least three times a week) the entire year. Until the following August, when we would begin the whole process again.