Shannon Proudfoot with Maria Burgess, her high school French teacher and now a good friend. They are working in the garage “tomato factory” in Sault Ste Marie.Supplied
The baloney-and-mustard-on-white-bread sandwiches in my school lunches were made with a lot of love. But when you’re surrounded by lunch boxes filled with crusty rolls, good cheese and home-cured salami, you feel hard done by.
I grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., home to a large Italian diaspora drawn in the early part of the twentieth century by jobs in the steel and paper mills. One in five residents now claim Italian ancestry, but the proportion was even higher in the west end where I lived. Or maybe it just seemed that way because I’ve spent so much time envying their food culture.
I love to cook, but the cuisine I want to master more than anything else – the freshness, richness and subtlety of the Italian home cooking I coveted in the Sault – has always felt out of reach. Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is one of my culinary bibles, but without access to still-warm-from-the-fields fresh produce, an entire day to make a single meal or – most crucial and unattainable of all – genetics and family traditions, it felt impossible.
Every year starting in late August, I’m reminded of this, as people from back home post photos on Facebook of similar scenes: Multiple generations of family working in a garage or carport; machines that look like an industrial Play-Doh Fun Factory; propane burners with huge pots steaming over them; gleaming red jewels of distilled sunshine. Roma tomato season. To my inexperienced eyes, it always looks like an incomprehensible, delicious magic trick.
And then my friend Maria told me about her own August tradition.
The tomato factory
Supplied
Maria Burgess was my high school French teacher, and she is, frankly, too much goodness for a room of teenagers. In my class, rolling your Rs was an uncool sign that you were trying too hard. And into that performative ennui burst this woman who loves language and food and her daughters and husband and theatre and music, and the delights and absurdities of a world much bigger than our small Northern Ontario city – all of which she laid joyfully at our feet.
Maria immigrated to Canada with her family from the village of Dogliola in Abruzzo when she was five, so she speaks beautiful Italian as well as the French she learned in Canada, and her classroom was a window into both cultures. Every time I eat tiramisu, I think instantly of Mme Burgess, explaining that tira mi sù means “pick me up,” describing a dessert that sure does.
We’ve become good friends over the last several years after reconnecting on Facebook, so now, we get to talk about the same things we did in her classroom 25 years ago – plus the charming little grandson who is her sun, moon and stars – but over texts, glasses of wine and leisurely dinner parties.
At one point, she told me about “the tomato factory” she and her husband, Steve, set up in their garage at the end of every summer, with family and friends processing their own cases of tomatoes, just like the photos that always mesmerize and mystify me. I immediately asked if I could be an apprentice.
When the first boxes of Romas appeared in the Sault in mid-August, Maria texted to say we had about a two-week window, so I booked my flight from Ottawa. My mom collected supplies for me: three 25-pound cases of tomatoes, a big basil plant, celery, flat-leaf Italian parsley, a jar of peeled garlic cloves and wide-mouthed Mason jars.
The garage doors were open and the factory ready to go when I arrived.
Cooking school
First, we dumped the tomatoes into a plastic tub of cold water for cleaning, then I shook them off and moved them to a laundry basket, trimming any mushy or rotted bits off the few that were damaged.
Maria and Steve have been doing some version of this for four decades. They used to chop the tomatoes by hand, and one year, Maria waited until they were in the thick of it before casually mentioning to Steve that she’d seen a machine that would process the tomatoes automatically, though for the hefty price of $400. “Go get it right now,” Steve said.
And so they now have the spremipomodoro (”tomato squeezer”), whose ingenious magic is of Willy Wonka proportions. You drop blanched tomatoes into a hopper, using a fat nylon stick to push them down the chute. A horizontal auger operated by a powerful motor carries the tomatoes along, so that the juice and pulp squeeze out along a metal tube perforated by fine holes, running down a ramp into a pot, while the seeds and skins fall out the far end. This miracle processed 50 pounds of my tomatoes for cooked sauce – sugo – in half an hour.
We added that liquid gold to a huge pot sitting over a propane burner, where we’d sautéed garlic, parsley and celery in olive oil, then tossed in fresh basil, salt, pepper and a little sugar. We simmered it for two hours, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon as long as a baseball bat, while the garage filled with an aroma that thrilled me for how it smelled just right – pure and bright, like something I never thought I’d be able to make.
Maria showed me how to preserve the third box of tomatoes “fresh” by cutting them into large chunks and compressing them into Mason jars, raw, with a few handfuls of basil leaves. “You remember the sun,” Maria says. “It tastes like summer all year long.”
Traditions old and new
Learning all of this felt like being inducted into a secret society after spending my whole life with my nose pressed against the glass. But for Maria, the tomato factory stitches her present to the past, from her mom who died in 2017 – known to all in her orbit as Mamma Gina – to the vast expanse of generations before her.
“I come from a culture that really relies on tradition. We rely on things that we learned how to make as poor people, from hundreds of years ago,” Maria says. “That’s why I do it: to have my mom near me, and to have all of my foremothers and forefathers near me.”
In Maria’s house, the raw tomatoes we packed with basil are now known as “Tobia Tomatoes” because her brother-in-law, whose surname is Tobia, introduced that technique to her family. I now have a tidy row of jars labelled “Tobia Tomatoes” waiting on a shelf at my mom’s house to be driven to me in Ottawa, while my family will call the cooked version, always and forever, “MariaSauce.”
When I got back to Ottawa, I was so smitten that I bought a used hand-crank spremipomodoro and, powered by my kids’ manic energy, processed one more box of tomatoes. When we were on our front steps washing our tomatoes and basil, my neighbour walked by and immediately realized what we were up to, because he’d done his own the week before. “How do you do yours?” he asked, because everyone has their own technique. Feeling like I’d discovered a secret handshake, I told him what I’d learned from Maria in the tomato factory.
Sometimes, you can acquire a tiny bit of what you’re lacking in genetics through friendship.
What you learn in a garage that you can’t from a cookbook
Planning and intel: Tomato season starts when the big boxes of Roma tomatoes show up in the stores, and it ends when they’re all gone, so being ready – and making friendly inquiries with your grocer of choice – is key.
What isn’t perfect can still be great: Ripe, juicy tomatoes with a little bit of damage are just fine if you cut off the bad bits. It’s the young, pale and flavourless ones you want to avoid.
Get your tomatoes into squeezing condition: We dropped the tomatoes into a huge pot of boiling water, leaving them to blanch just until their skins started to split, before running them through the spremipomodoro.
Restraint and balance: Maria told me to follow my heart in measuring basil, so when I tried to recreate her sauce in Ottawa, I decided the right amount of basil was “more.” The end result was not as good, with the fresh tomato brightness muddied, almost like a commercial sauce trying to cover its sins.
How to capture summer in a bottle: When we’re ready to eat them, the “fresh” preserved tomatoes will be run through a food mill (a passatutto, as in: all passes through it) and added to sautéing garlic, hot peppers and basil for a quick, bright marinara sauce.
When not to be fussy: Maria chopped onions, basil and tomatoes with a ton of skill but little fuss, and we used a food processor to dice the garlic, parsley and celery. No perfectly-even mincing, no wasting time on pointless technique. The final product was spectacular. Real skill means knowing what matters and what’s just for show.