Tomato Day. Oh God, if anyone found out about it I’d die. There we sat, last Saturday, in my grandmother’s backyard, cutting the bad bits off over-ripe tomatoes and squeezing them. After doing ten crates of those, we boiled them, squashed them, then boiled them again. That in turn made spaghetti sauce. We bottled it in beer bottles and stored it in Nonna’s cellar.
Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetta
We used to grow tomatoes in the corner of our garden. When it was my turn to water them before school, I would point the hose in their general direction, and sit with a book, waiting for the allotted time to pass so I could head back inside for breakfast. Underneath their fuzzy leaves, the tomatoes would turn from green to orange to red, swelling as they darkened, and giving off a heady scent I still associate with those unbearably hot Brisbane summers.
I might have been ambivalent towards my job of watering the plants, but I have never been anything but enthusiastically dedicated to the fruit itself. As a teen, I would have happily subsisted on tricolore salad alone. I eat tomatoes like apples, biting straight through the firm, fragrant skin, and allowing their seeds to drip through my fingers. A bowl of cherry tomatoes left on the kitchen countertop will disappear slowly but steadily over the course of a day as I pass back and forth.
When I squash a deep-red tomato in my palm, or simmer a batch of them on the stove, I think of Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi. I think of Josie Alibrandi’s exasperation with her sprawling extended family, about the fact that they are all entirely and unapologetically themselves, and about their infamous tomato day. If you, like the Alibrandis (or my family, when our plants were generous with their fruit), are lucky enough to bring home a glut of tomatoes, I have a few recipe suggestions over the following pages. You can, of course, bottle the whole lot to last you through the cold winter (p. 158). But I’ve always been just as happy to use tins out of season, so I can commit myself to eating whatever I can get my hands on through the glorious summer months.