Passata Day, or the Weekend the Kitchen Becomes a Factory
You hear it before you see it: from the courtyard below comes the industrial clatter of a machine being cranked, a wet grinding sound, and over it several voices in loud disagreement about whether the flame is too high. It is eight in the morning on a Saturday near the end of August, the light is already white and hard, and somewhere down there a family has begun the single most productive day in its culinary year. By tonight they will have put up a hundred bottles of tomato passata — enough to carry them, one Sunday sauce at a time, all the way to next summer. They will also, at some point in the afternoon, have a proper argument. Both of these things are traditional. This is la giornata della passata — passata day, sometimes the salsa day, the great domestic tomato-bottling that happens across southern Italy and much of the Mediterranean and Balkan world in the last weeks of summer, when the tomatoes come in faster than anyone can eat them and the only rational response...
