Passata Drama

• Mia D'Agostino, Grade 5
• Short Story
• 2009

One early summer’s morning...like 4 am early, my brother Max and I set off to my Grandparents house. They are Italian so we call them Nonna and Nonno.

We are going to help them make tomato sauce, they call Passata. But we are not the only ones helping my Auntie Catarina is also coming along to help... although I can tell you now she wont be there too early!!!

When we get there they had already started working in the back yard because Nonna couldn’t sleep, she was thinking about the thirty boxes of tomatoes and if they would survive the night without spoiling.

To make the Passata everyone has different jobs. Nonna and I split the tomatoes and squeeze out the seeds so the sauce does not taste bitter. Nonna also likes to sniff the tomatoes and make sure they are not off. If one bad tomato goes in the sauce it will ruin all of it. Nonna is very fussy about this part! We have a Good Bucket and a Bad Bucket to divide them up.

Then the good tomatoes are boiled for twenty minutes to soften them, ready for Nonno’s job. His job is to put the cooked tomatoes through the machine which takes out the leftover seeds and turn’s the rest into liquid.

After this Auntie Catarina, Max and I strain the liquid into beer bottles through a strainer, Nonno puts the metal caps on and then all the bottles go into a big metal drum which is boiled over a gas fire for a couple of hours. Then Nonno spends all afternoon stacking the bottles in his garage – enough sauce for the whole family for an entire year!!

About this time is when Nonna starts complaining about all the mess that Nonno makes, and tells us it will be the last year he helps her........but she says that every year.

Usually our jobs are finished, and we all go inside for breakfast. That’s usually where the story ends, but this year was different.

That night our phone rang really late – it was Nonna. “Quick, phone the police somebody is shooting at the windows, hurry, hurry !”.

My dad rang the police, and then we all jumped in the car to see what all the commotion was about. The police cars were already there when we arrived, and they were talking to my grandparents, everything looked o.k because they were all laughing.

It turned out that Nonno had not stacked the bottles properly – they had started exploding in the garage, and sounded like gun shots to Nonna and Nonno.

All our hard work was now running down the driveway under the police cars and into the gutter. Looked to me like we were in for another four am start!