Remembering Pompeii with homemade tomato sauce

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I still had some mason jars left over after making jam with Squeaky, so I decided to try my hand at canning tomato sauce next. I adapted a delicious recipe given to me by Chef Hermann Jenny that uses canned tomatoes instead of fresh.

I used San Marzano tomatoes. You can get these at any Italian grocer (I got mine from La Bottega in Byward Market). They are grown and imported all the way from the fertile plains of Mount Vesuvius near Naples, shown in the map below. Pompeii, that famous ancient Roman city buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., is also nearby. It's just a little southwest of where they still grow the tomatoes in San Marzano sul Sarno.

It's strange to think that the same volcanic ash that makes San Marzano tomatoes so special today was also responsible for burying entire cities over 2,000 years ago. That said, San Marzano tomatoes are not native to the region. Coincidentally, just 22 years after archeologists uncovered the remains of Pompeii in 1748, the Kingdom of Peru gave the first San Marzano seeds to the Kingdom of Naples.


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Tomato sauce
makes about 6 and a half cups

drop of olive oil
1/2 cup diced pancetta or bacon
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
2 crushed dried cayenne peppers (or 1 tsp dried)
1 cup olive oil
5 Tbsp tomato paste
2 800-g cans of San Marzano tomatoes
a 1" by 3"piece of parmesan rind or other hard cheese
small hunk of salt pork rind
1/2 Tbsp herbes de Provence
a couple of beef bouillon cubes
1 Tbsp oregano
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper to taste

Saute the pancetta and the onions in the olive oil for about 10 minutes or until soft. Add the garlic and the dried cayenne pepper and saute another minute. Add the tomato paste and stir to make a paste with the other ingredients.

Then add the canned tomatoes and break them apart a bit with your wooden spoon. Add the rest of the ingredients and cover and cook in the oven for three hours at 125 C/250 F.

Discard the salt pork rind and bay leaves. The parmesan rind should easily break up and dissolve into the sauce.

Follow the canning directions that come with your preserving jars, and top each jar with a layer of hot olive oil, about 1/4 of an inch think to sterilize the top layer of sauce.

Alternatively, you can freeze the sauce if you'll be keeping it for more than a few weeks, but in that case, store it in a Tupperware instead of a glass jar.

This is lovely in pasta or pizza, and to spread on toast!

Jammin'

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For the first time in our lives, Squeaky and I made jam — raspberry-peach, peach and blueberry — with fruit from the farmers' market.

We followed the directions on the Certo package, and also some wisdom gleaned from the Internet and Squeaky's aunt, a seasoned jammer.

My gosh, even for a detail person like me, jamming is nitpicky and not like the kind of cooking I am used to.

Firstly, you have to sterilize everything but the kitchen sink. I do not own a canner, so we baked our jars in the oven at 225 F for 10 minutes. We boiled the lid rings for 10 minutes, but not the actual lids, no, those you must immerse in just-boiled-but-not-boiling water, otherwise the seal will be damaged.



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Then you have to skim off the sludge and bubbles that rise to the top while boiling the jam. And you have to make sure you don't get any jam on the lip of the lid when putting it into jars.


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We were also a bit grossed out by how much sugar you have to add: cup for cup of fruit, and then some! I had no idea I was eating so much sugar every time I had jam. But if you don't add all that sugar, the jam won't set, they say.

Well, our attention to all these painstaking details was all worth it when we heard the little "pop" that meant a vacuum had pulled the lid down into place. It was music to my ears because it meant, we had gotten it right!

To make the peach jam, we made light Xs in the skin at the bottom and top of the peaches, blanched them for 30 seconds in boiling water and then transferred them right away to a bowl of cold water for a few minutes. Then the skins were easy to peel off (you can skin tomatoes the exact same way).


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S and I are tucking into the raspberry-peach right now (below). I know it looks a bit radioactive, but I kind of like the psychedelic red. No hallucinations so far, just a mighty fine sweet taste.


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