Tomato
Memoirs
For some people, early
September is tomato season, not just the time for harvesting a fruit once
believed to be poisonous, but those two weeks of the year when garage doors in
our ghettos are slightly ajar as propane quietly burns indoors.
While most garages store
cars, junk and dust, many Italian Canadians’ garages bustle with activity
around Labour Day. Hundreds of jars of tomatoes are
being preserved.
It was Mario at work who
got me thinking about pommodore
or “golden apples” if you translate the Latin-Italian combo directly. On the
previous night, he had just bought four bushels for his 84 year-old mother, and
when he arrived with the goods from the market, her eyes were alit. In the
words of his wife, a modern Italian who sins by using store-bought sauce in the
winter, the old woman’s expression was orgasmic.
For senior citizens,
Canadian winters are cruel, taking their toll as more people die in the snowy
months than during any other season. Tomato sauce to a traditionalist must
unconsciously be a symbol of hope. One hundred fifty jars stored in the cantina act like a companion, promising
to pull the aged through another counted year of life. Sauce is the colour of blood, and like life itself, it can be sweet and
aromatic.
When we were children,
tomato-time was a community effort. Someone inevitably had a pickup that would
be driven off the island, either to the farms of
The tomato farmer whose
fields were about to be invaded was typically not Italian, thinner than most of
us, and especially apprehensive, having heard stories from his neighbours who had seen similar hillbillies ravaging through
their fields like locusts (mind you, cute and pudgy ones) and overpacking bushels to double the sane density.
After driving the
treasure home, we laid the fruit out on old blankets to let it ripen. For an
entire week the house smelled of tomatoes, the aroma intensifying if rookies
had mistakenly picked bruised or rotten samples.
The next weekend, the
home with the widest garage was chosen, a makeshift table was set up and tasks
were assigned. It was a division of labour that was
the envy of efficient industrialists; there were washers who recycled Unico, Kraft and
My favorite part was the
actual cooking stage. Old oil barrels were taken to the fields, where our
parents placed the containers on leftover construction blocks. Sauce jars were
wrapped in old rags; the nearest neighbour’s hose
would be dragged out to fill each barrel with water. At night, while crickets
chirped away, and when uninvolved neighbours least
suspected it, the fires were lit. We played hide-and-seek for hours in spite of
the darkness, knowing that our parents would not retreat into their homes until
the sauce had been preserved.