Bloody tomatoes

It's that time of year when all self-respecting Italian peasants must make tomato sauce. Not the thick acidic stuff that people squeeze onto hamburgers, but the simple tomato pulp or "passata" that is the basis for so many Italian pasta sauces and stews.

In the photo Erminia is preparing her boiler, which is sited about ten meters from my bedroom window. In late July and early August there is a fire burning in this thing from about six in the morning, filling our house with the smell of woodsmoke. Erminia is not too fussy about the fuel she uses and this year happily broke up and consigned to the flames an old melamine chest of drawers, which made a thick black sooty mark up the side of her whitewashed kitchen wall and left our house reeking for days of burned plastic. When I went round to investigate, Erminia was crouched over the boiler as black and sweaty as the Chief Stoker on a steamship. "Is it making a smell?" She asked, innocently. "No, it's not a problem," I said, as always.

Normally we make our tomato sauce with Erminia and her family. This means having to get up at five in the morning and be shouted at a lot by Erminia. This year for the first time we decided to go it alone, so we could make about half the quantity considered essential by Erminia and complete the job in relative tranquility. To give her credit she coped pretty well, lending us a big saucepan and dropping in to check on us only four or five times. It's a simple process in which the tomatoes are boiled and then run through a machine which separates the pulp from the skins and the pips (hence "passata" as the tomatoes are "passed" through the machine). Then the pulp is loaded into jars which are boiled to sterilize them. We bought about eighty kilos of fresh tomatoes from our local market and after a hot and sweaty days labour we ended up with about the same number of half kilo jars of tomato sauce.

Obviously we made a massive saving on buying passata from the shops. Well no actually, the cost per jar of the tomatoes alone was more than than the cost of a jar of passata from our local supermarket, not counting our labour and all the equipment and materials we needed. This fact rather begs the question "why??" To which any Southern Italian will give you an unhesitating answer:

"Because, it's ours, we made it, we know what's in it, we know that it's good and we know that we've got enough of it to last us all year, whatever other shit may happen to go down."

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