The gregarious Rosa Matto rounds up family and friends to experience the magic behind a beloved, yet waning, cultural tradition that once brought together families in backyards right across South Australia.
As a young girl, Rosa Matto was disgusted to learn the key ingredient in her auntie’s recipe for the traditional Italian chocolate pudding sanguinaccio dolce was pig’s blood.
Each year, her zio (uncle) would slaughter a pig, which would be used nose-to-tail, not just for pancetta and prosciutto, but for her zia (aunty) to make everything from soap to chocolate cake. For young Rosa, it was a lesson in how to respect produce; an ethos that extends to many aspects of life today.
“We would hardly ever go to the fruit and veg shop because my dad grew whatever we needed at our home in Prospect,” says Rosa. “We picked olives and made olive oil. In winter, we’d make sausages and salami. In summer, we’d make passata with tomatoes we grew at home and in late summer, we made pickled vegetables. In autumn, my father and his brothers would make wine, but it was absolutely terrible!”
Rosa fondly recalls the sauce-making days of old.
Olivia Pinneri and Nancy Colarco put the cap on a bottle of passata.
“It’s a wonderful day to get together, but it’s a lot of hard work because traditionally we’d use the abundance of tomatoes to replenish the pantry for the winter. Southern Italian food is very tomato-based and it’s an important cultural ritual,” she says.
Times have changed. Access to good store-bought passata is one reason why the laborious annual sauce-making day is becoming a thing of the past. Rosa’s family hasn’t participated in the tradition since Rosa’s daughter Stephanie English left home.
This summer, however, Rosa decided it was time to dig out her equipment and invite family, friends and SALIFE to experience the magic of passata day. Today’s guests include Stephanie and her partner Hugh Barrett for his initiation into the passata tradition. Then there’s Rosa’s close friend, cheesemaker Gina Dal Santo; Flinders University professor Marinella Marmo and her son Luca; “best pastry cook in the world” Nancy Colarco, who has brought along basil from her garden; and another good friend in Sonia Pinneri with her granddaughters Mikayla and Olivia.
Sauce flows from the manual spremipomodoro machine.
“The children have the job of putting leaves of basil in the bottom of the bottle,” Rosa explains. “As they get older, they take on more important roles. It’s a rite of passage.” She adds with a laugh: “Stephanie never had the chance to progress beyond the basil and she claims this has scarred her”.
Each family has their own unique sauce-making methods passed down through generations. Rosa’s technique is specific to her family who came to Australia from the township of Altavilla Irpina in Campania.
Everything needs to be spotlessly clean before it all begins. The vine-ripened Roma tomatoes, which are ordered in bulk with a few days’ notice, must be checked for blemishes, and are then laid out on newspaper the day before.
The backyard is full of large steel pots, gas bottles, tubs and jars. Electric processing machines are available these days, but Rosa believes the traditional hand-crank version – called a spremipomodoro – makes a better, thicker sauce. Plus, it’s more fun … but only if you’re not making a huge amount of sauce.
There’s an urgency to get started so that everything can be done in time for lunch. “There’s a lot of directing and not much direction,” observes Hugh with a smile.
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With her northern Italian heritage, Gina has embraced passata-making “like a proper southerner”. Today, she has been given a managerial role. Both Gina and Rosa can remember when their families would burn timber to heat water in 44-gallon drums, while cooking home-grown veggies on the embers to feed the workforce.
“It’s like the birth of a baby, you have to have boiling water on the side,” says Rosa, who lights a flame under a pot to blanch the tomatoes. Some people skip this step, but Rosa says it softens the thick skin of the Roma tomatoes.
“It’s citizen science. All the knowledge about chemistry and spoilage is contained in folklore, learned through mistakes by doing it year after year,” she says. “It’s an innate empirical knowledge; a science that comes from experience.”
There’s plenty of action and a bit of makeshift ingenuity as the process moves along. Before long all the tomatoes have been blanched, run through the processor, salted, and then bottled.
Time for lunch! Nancy’s hand-made Sicilian pasta is served with the fresh sugo. Tomatoes that didn’t pass scrutiny are chopped into a salad and dressed with lemon-scented olive oil and basil.
“I feel like I’m in Italy,” Gina happily exclaims as the group tucks into lunch after the morning’s hard work.
At the head of the table, Rosa makes a toast, and it becomes clear that this custom is more about family and socialising than it is about tomato sauce. “I was born in the 1950s and every single family – I can tell you without fear of exaggeration – made passata,” says Rosa.
“Sometimes, when people say, ‘I love Italian food’, I think maybe they should come to passata day and see how much work is involved and if they still love Italian food after that, well then, bene e benvenuti alla tavola italiana (Good, and welcome to the Italian table).”
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of SALIFE magazine.
