Eating Alone: An Ode to My Nonno and the Tomatoes He Grew

For as long as I can remember, my Nonno kept a tomato garden. I’m sure my mom would be unable to remember her life without the garden, and for that matter, anyone on her side of the family.  All of our lives  — the twenty or so aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers that make up the Cremas — have been undisputedly shaped by tomato season. 

Tomato season is the end of the summer. It’s those days in August when the air is fat and lazy with heat, where water flows sluggishly into our mouths, into our glasses, into our palms, and into our gardens. If you watch a tomato grow throughout the summer, you will notice the slow swelling of its body, and the even slower marbling of colours as your tomato changes from green to red. They weigh down their vines with a beautiful suggestiveness, round and plump and vibrant. Tomatoes are something you wait for, something you are rewarded with if you are gentle and calm and patient, even during those hot and unbearable final summer months. Especially during them. 

My Nonno knew this. He was not a man one would necessarily characterize as gentle, calm or patient, in fact, quite the opposite. Fiery and stubborn, he could fight with you about anything in a tireless doggedness. He had hands like baseball mitts, huge and weathered, with strength that seemed to rise from within him like a volcano, its supply never-ending. And yet, this was the man who was rewarded, time and time again, by Mother Nature for his gentility, his calmness, and most of all, his patience.

Every year in the spring, the tomato plants would appear in my Nonna’s kitchen. They would begin to grow from their small plastic pots — in and around the chaos that always exists within a big family. Perched on their spot by the kitchen table they would witness countless meals: porridge and chamomile tea in the morning, alongside a bowl of melon, or perhaps a half grapefruit, lunches of large sandwiches on crusty Italian bread, with cold cuts and mayonnaise and dijon mustard, pieces of Genoa salami unrolled from their casing, chunks of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a wild assortment of dinners, always fresh, always delicious and always accompanied by a simple green salad. 

I spent my childhood summers in my Nonno’s backyard. Summers that felt completely free and totally uninhibited. As a child, summer provides a season in which time moves both so quickly and yet so slowly, long days where all other rules and conventions do not apply. And for us, there was only one rule: never to enter my Nonno’s tomato garden. My cousins and I climbed the fig tree and sprayed each other with the hose, we played sprawling games of tag in the alley, we ate popsicles and watermelon on the grass. But entering the garden was never an option. 

Whenever Nonno came outside, to water the plants or go through the compost, we would watch with awe. Sometimes we were allowed to help. We threw old shells into the dirt, a natural way to enrich the soil, and held the hose for him, while he checked the progress of each plant. Watching him move throughout the garden, quiet and thoughtful, it was always clear to us why we were not supposed to mess around. Nonno’s garden was everyone’s garden. It was where the food that raised our parents, and in turn raised us, was grown. It was the love and care my Nonno had for each of us, melding with the earth, creating something greater than us, that had been there for longer than us. It was his heart growing in the garden, providing for us and nourishing us. 

Eating a fresh summer tomato requires nothing more than a knife and some salt. Cutting them in half and salting them, tomatoes are truly a jewel of the earth. They taste bright and warm and sweet, hearty and delicious. At the end of the summer, my Nonna would can the tomatoes, preserving their sunny summer flavour for the year to come. And as the year progressed, sometimes we would come home to see a package my Nonna had dropped off, plastic bags full of tupperwares, brimming with homemade bean soup, pesto, and, of course, pasta sauce. Bolognese and marinara, rich with the preserved taste of summer tomatoes. Eating a late summer tomato in the dead of winter, sitting down to a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and tasting the hot August sun has always made those winter months so much brighter; a reminder of life and sun and growth. 

The tomato season, while still the agricultural highlight of my family’s year, is now one tinged with longing. The passing of my Nonno two years ago was an event to be expected, but still something so unbearable. He was not around for that Christmas, unable to taste one of his favourite dishes (my Nonna’s Christmas Eve baccala, consisting of salted cod, parsley, potatoes, and an ungodly amount of olive oil) for the last time. While that meal felt subsumed by our family’s collective longing, unable to accept a Christmas without the feeling of his presence at the dinner table, it was, of course, the tomato season which brought him back. That next fall, eating spaghetti and meatballs, with Nonna’s home-made bolognese, we did not feel an absence as we ate. The taste of those tomatoes reignited us, reminding us of tomato seasons past and of the man who’s hard work would continue to feed us for years to come. 

Hannah Murray is a recent graduate of McGill University’s Liberal Arts program. She is passionate about the stories food is able to tell, and is eager to share her personal stories with the readers of Graphite through her column, Eating Alone. @__eatingalone