A typycally Italian tradition...Homemade tomato sauce in my courtyard!

I want to tell you a typically Italian tradition that in Emilia Romagna is passed from generation to generation, the HOMEMADE TOMATO SAUCE to use on pasta all year round.

My grandmother in the middle of August begins to stir, to ask if the tomatoes in fields are already mature and to prepare the bottles, new caps, a big  pot and various tools to cook the tomato.

Depending on the season, but usually in late August, a little truck arrived one morning in the courtyard and download some stacks of boxes full of beautiful red tomato!

 Everyone rush to check if the maturation is right, of there are rotten tomatoes and to assess the amount of sauce that it may derive from them.

 

The morning after my grandmother, my uncles, began to wash the tomatoes in large basin filled with water, careful to discard the rotten tomato.

Once washed, the tomato is boiled in a big pot

 

Then is placed above long and narrow baskets, is carefully crushed and covered with very clean table cloth and left to lose water for a whole night.

At dawn the next day the whole tomato is transferred in large gas-fired huge pot which cooks for 2 or 3 hours, often mixed.

 

Then tomato is passed through a mincer to remove the skin, the bottles are filled with sauce and put the cap on them.

The bottles are lined up on the floor and covered with woolen cloth to cool slowly.

In the days when the tomato is prepared the yard and all the apartments are filled with a fantastic aroma of tomatoes, I would like to add a file in my blog for you to try this fantastic fragrance!! :D

I do not know whether future generations will maintain this tradition, a little tiring, but definitely charming and evocative of capabilities, handmade things, good things!

When you open a bottle of homemade tomato sauce come out a perfume that smells of sunshine, joy, warmth, friendship, good things.