Preserving Traditions - Old and New
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Along with shorter days, brighter leaves and cooler temperatures, fall brings with it the promise of a new start. For decades that meant the launch of a new school year - for me, for our son and for the students at the university where I went to work each day. Although those chapters of my life are now behind me, the quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald still rings true. Life, or at least the promise of new beginnings, does start all over again after Labour Day.
This is the time for swapping out shorts for jeans, tee shirts for sweaters and flip flops for loafers. Our backyard garden is also switching to its autumn wardrobe as the final batch of tomatoes, eggplant, basil and peppers ripen in the waning sunshine. It has been a joy to pick just the right tomato to use in salads and sandwiches since they started to turn from green to red in July. And Swiss chard to sauté with garlic and olive oil. But it’s now time to bring the harvest into the kitchen and to begin the annual ritual of preserving summer in anticipation of the long, dark days of winter ahead.
Is there better time of the year for someone who is thrilled by the colours and scents of the pots of fragrant basil, the abundance of peppers produced by the six plants that seemed so fragile when we brought them home from the nursery in early June and the baby eggplant, hiding like little purple jewels in the garden? For someone who loves the sight of bushels of apples and piles of pumpkins and squash at the local farm stands?
In our family, as for most Italian-Canadians, September meant producing jars and jars of conserva (the dialect for tomato sauce) to store in the basement cantina for use throughout the year in Sunday lunches and mid-week pasta dinners. My new tradition, born of connecting with food-loving friends and neighbours in the community we made our home five years ago, is Pesto Fest. Instead of picking, washing, seeding and peeling tomatoes, four of us gather early in September, armed with bouquets of basil, tarragon, sage and parsley. The kitchen becomes an aromatic assembly line as we strip the leaves from each bunch of herbs, toast pine nuts and walnuts and grate parmesan cheese to add, along with fruity olive oil, to the food processor to make batches of pesto. As we work together to produce the beautiful little souvenirs of summer flavour, we plan how we will use the various kinds of pesto on pasta, fish and focaccia over the winter months.
With this year’s Pesto Fest over, I couldn’t resist the 90-minute drive to my favourite grocery store, renowned for its produce department. The trip was worth it – I found baskets of baby cucumbers lined up beside fragrant dill, ready to be pickled together. And bins of red Shepherd peppers that I planned to dry in my first attempt to make cruschi, the local specialty of Basilicata that we so enjoyed during our visits to Pisticci.
It was 40 years ago at the Kitchener Farmer’s Market where, as a young mother working with a very limited budget and zero canning experience, that I was first inspired to bring home bushels of peppers, onions and cucumbers. What a thrill to line up the bottles of colourful relish made from hand-chopping the peppers and onions! And I learned the difference between pickling salt and table salt the heartbreaking way when the first, cloudy bottles of dill pickles ended up in the garbage instead of on our table. Decades of cooking experience has taught me to use the right kind of salt, but hasn’t dampened the satisfaction of pulling jars of pickles from their boiling water bath to set on the counter, waiting for that “ping” that tells me the lids are safely sealed.
So many years after first trying my had at preserving, I now possess the confidence to make dill pickles without a second thought. Cruschi are another matter! These crunchy treats are a long-standing tradition in Basilicata, where my cousins use Peperone di Senise, an heirloom pepper from Senise, a town 60 km south of Pisticci. Like wine and olive oil, these peppers are geographically protected in Italy via the I.G.P. (Indicazione Geografica Protetta), ensuring that only peppers grown in Basilicata qualify to be named Peperoni di Senise. The peppers are set out in the sun and, once completely dry, stored to use later by frying very briefly in olive. The end result is a deep burgundy, crispy treat eaten as a snack or appetizer or crumbled over pasta.
But Senise peppers aren’t available Canada and September sunshine in Ontario is very different from that in Italy. I decide that red sheppard peppers will make the perfect substitute and, after a brief, but failed attempt to dry them on the patio on a sunny day, search for the dehydration setting on my oven. Many hours later, I am rewarded with a beautiful batch of peppers that look very much like those in my cousin Giovanna’s kitchen in Pisticci. “I’m glad to have shared a piece of Zia Antonietta’s traditions with you”, she replied in response to the photos I sent of the Canadian version of cruschi. And I celebrate the birth of a new preserving tradition in our home, passed down over the course of more than a hundred years from my grandmother to my aunt, to her daughter-in-law, to me.
Now on a preserving roll, I turn to the garden’s tiny, perfect eggplant. I remember the pickled version, fragrant with mint and garlic and submerged in extra virgin olive oil, that Mom made each year to serve with Mortadella sandwiches or alongside cold cuts for a casual Sunday evening dinner. There are plenty of homestyle recipes for Italian pickled eggplant available online, but I call Mom, my personal authority on the matter. “Be sure to salt and press the eggplant to get rid of the bitterness”, she says. “And you don’t need to boil the jars after you fill them. Just put them in the cantina or the fridge.” Mom’s memory isn’t reliable enough to recall the ratio of vinegar to water to pickle the eggplant, so I check in with another of my cousins for her advice. Beatrice shares the recipe she learned from her mother, which adds hot peppers to the mix. And the result is a fabulous combination of sour, hot, minty and garlicky and a big hit on an appetizer platter shared with friends.
Then there are the tomatoes. As we pick the last of the season from the garden, I hear my father’s voice telling me that it’s time to make conserva. I can still smell the tomatoes ripening on the green tarp in my parents’ basement, the sauce bubbling in the big aluminum pot reserved for this purpose and the basil from the garden that would be stuffed into the bottles of conserva before they were submerged in their boiling water bath to be processed. And I remember how much work this was for Mom as she spent hours each day in the basement kitchen, preserving the bushels and bushels of tomatoes Dad had brought home. This is a family tradition that my sisters and I haven’t preserved. I will spend the weekend making a few bottles of chunky and spicy ketchup instead. A choice my father would never have understood or approved of!
If fall is about new starts, this season of my life is about blending family traditions with fresh ones shaped equally by years of practice and new connections. I will think of my Nonna, my Zia Antonietta and my cousins in Pisticci when I serve crushi. Of my current community of food lovers when I open a jar of pesto in January and of childhood Sunday suppers when I add pickled eggplant to sandwiches in our kitchen. And as we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving in Canada, I am grateful for the bounty of our little garden and local farmers’ fields and for the friends and family who I am lucky to share traditions, old and new, and meals with throughout the year.