The Tomato Chronicles
When we married, I confess I didn’t warn my husband that preserving tomatoes for sauce is serious business in my Italian family. The tomatoes have to be the correct size, ripeness, and variety. Access to large quantities of quality tomatoes in an isolated Northern Ontario town, 500 miles away from the nearest tomato farm, was a challenge. When I was young, I never knew exactly where the tomatoes came from. I heard whispers and complaints about their origins and marvelled at the mountain of tomatoes spread out on wooden planks in our garage but I never asked for details.
Even after I married, I enjoyed a steady supply of preserves, courtesy of my mother. I’d leave her house with cases of filled mason jars and visited her cold room when I ran out. My children and non-Italian husband became tomato sauce snobs and would accept no substitutes, so after my mother passed away, I set out to educate myself.
My cousin Rose, the family’s reigning tomato authority, schooled me in the way of the tomato and included me in her yearly multi-family production which involved processing twenty to thirty bushels. I learned that we’d have to wait until mid to late August when the tomato trucks drove up through the night from Leamington in Southwestern Ontario. Their long growing season and hot, humid weather yielded tomatoes that achieved full marks from even the most discriminating Italian cook. But there was a problem. There were a lot of impatient Italians waiting for tomatoes. And we never knew exactly when the trucks would arrive. And the supply was limited.
Every August, I inspected and cleaned the mason jars I’d inherited from my mother, prepared the chairs and wooden planks in the garage, and conferred with Rose. Our Tomato Chronicles spreadsheet tracked yield per bushel from the previous year and consumption by family, helping us determine purchase amounts for the current year. Our plan also considered schedules, logistics, and contingencies.
What if the tomatoes arrived in the middle of the work week?
Were the fair, blue-eyed husbands prepared to mobilize on short notice? Did they accept the gravity of the mission? They needed to attend the trucks and acquire the heavy bushels.
What if they required a period of rest (the tomatoes, not the husbands)? Green tomatoes could ruin the sauce but waiting for them to ripen could throw off the entire schedule.
There was an unspoken code — whoever sighted the trucks or was tipped off first started the phone chain to alert the others.
“The tomatoes are here! They’re small but they’re good.”
“The best ones are in the empty lot across from the police station.”
“Don’t go to the other truck. He hides the crappy tomatoes under the good ones.”
“There may be another truck Wednesday. The guy wouldn’t commit.”
There was pressure to buy only the tomatoes sanctioned by the older, wiser cousins and aunts. But holding out also meant risking the unthinkable - missing the tomato season all together. This was more stressful than planning my wedding.
Every August my cousin and I dispatched our non-Italian husbands with specific orders to inspect the cases and not settle for sub-standard product. There should’ve been crowd control. Our very polite, very Canadian husbands were no match for a bunch of Italian men, also sent by their wives with strict instructions to bring back the best tomatoes. It was a scramble with no system and even first-come, first-served wasn’t a guarantee. Although the trucks were across from the police station, this didn’t prevent raised voices, near riots, and at least one fist fight.
One year, the tomato vendors instituted a queue, where each customer was assigned a sequential number upon their arrival. This might have mitigated the mob behaviour except people traded numbers, consolidated orders, and held numbers for their soon to arrive friends. I was suspicious when our husbands arrived at 6:00 a.m., among the first in line, but were given numbers lower in the queue than those that rolled in at 8:00 a.m.
After years of 6:00 a.m. starts and humiliation at the hands of my countrymen, my husband was worn out.
“Please don’t ask me to go back to the tomato trucks,” he begged. “Ever again.”
He knew how important the tradition was and he loved the fresh sauce, but he’d reached his limit. We’d heard that bushels of tomatoes were becoming more available at our grocery stores anyway. Even though the seasoned tomato makers still swore by the Leamington trucks, citing better quality at lower prices, I chose the health of my marriage over my obsession with the perfect tomato.
In time, my husband and I developed our own network of informants and purchased tomatoes at grocery stores in a riot-free environment. I still needed my husband to accompany me to lift the heavy boxes. But at least he didn’t suffer humiliation in the produce department at Metro.
We may have won the tomato war, but those sassy fruit won one more battle.
One morning, our grocery store informant texted us. “The tomatoes are here. There are plenty of them but don’t wait too long.”
We went as soon as we could and purchased three cases. My husband placed two cases in the shopping cart and balanced the third case in the toddler seat section at the top. I was about to applaud his efficiency when the cart hit a rut on the way to our car and the top case upended, hurling most of the tomatoes across the busy parking lot and through a stop sign. As the oblong tomatoes rolled in haste to escape their fate, a gaggle of strangers appeared out of nowhere, stopped traffic to scoop up the little red rebels, and returned them to our cart. I was about to reach for my phone to capture the hilarity but abandoned the photo opportunity when I saw my husband’s pained expression. Once again, I put the health of my marriage first. Judging from the rescuers’ determined faces, I was the only one that found this funny. We’ll never know if all tomatoes were present and accounted for. It’s possible that cars leaving the parking lot that day were puzzled by the squishing sounds.
We moved to Southern Ontario over five years ago and at first, I was giddy that bushels of approved tomatoes were available minutes away. There were no August scrambles, phone chains, or misdemeanors. And yet, I’ve reduced my tomato production to almost nothing. Perhaps it’s become too easy.
