In the years after World War II, as a new wave of migration scattered Italians abroad, tens of thousands made the long journey to Australia to escape the poverty and devastation in their defeated nation.
Even as they built a new life in a new land, many held tight to the habits and customs of the old country. Thus a tradition was born in cities and towns across Australia: “passata day,” an often-raucous annual gathering when families would labor to make an entire year’s supply of tomato passata, a rich, bright-red purée that is a staple in Italian cuisine.
Today, the tradition is dying among the 1.1 million Australians with Italian ancestry. Most in the second and third generations deem making passata to be too hard, too messy and too expensive. Many lack the required equipment, skills and patience. Why bother, they argue, when store shelves are packed with relatively cheap, palatable mass-produced sauce?
Don’t tell that to Silvana Hurst and Filomena Medcalf. The two sisters, who live in suburban Melbourne, are passionate champions of passata day, an inheritance from their parents, Giuseppe and Annina Luciani, who arrived in Australia from southern Italy in the 1950s.
Not only are Mrs. Hurst, 63, and Mrs. Medcalf, 60, ensuring that the custom is passed on to their own families. They are also determined to introduce others to the old Italian ways, by turning their home into an open-door passata factory where curious neighbors, food- and wine-loving friends and the occasional work colleague create what amounts to a boisterous social event that can carry on for hours.
They have simpler motivations, too. “It tastes better,” said Mrs. Hurst, emphasizing her point with a laugh and a flourish of her hand. “Everyone knows that.”
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The annual passata extravaganza played out in a delightfully chaotic yet impressively efficient scene last month at Mrs. Hurst’s home. After breakfast, the sisters’ husbands, Harvey Hurst and Craig Medcalf, were the first to tie their aprons and don yellow and green rubber gloves. “Allora,” said Mr. Medcalf, using the popular Italian filler word that indicates something is about to commence.
Tomato passata is made by cooking and straining tomatoes to create an unflavored, uncooked purée. The two husbands diligently ran the passata-making operations with help from a working party that included those slowly getting the hang of it, nervous but willing first-timers and children noisily weaving in and out of trouble while still being productive.
As they raced through their work, the purée makers shouted and laughed while aluminum vats of boiling water hissed and threw off steam, and customized machinery and appliances clanked and whirred.
Not one of the laborers was Italian.
In under four hours, they cooked 600 pounds of washed tomatoes. They ran them twice through a trusty decades-old stainless steel mincer that the sisters’ father had used, employing a food pusher he had fashioned from a discarded piece of timber. They added salt to the warm, aromatic liquid before transferring it to a kitchen sink fitted with a plastic tap for easy dispensing into 25-ounce bottles. They fill the jars — enough to supply the two families for a year, plus a small allocation for the helpers — then seal and sterilize them in boiling water in two steel drums.
“Not bad, huh?” Mr. Hurst said, gesturing at the final product. Behind him, at the back of the garage, Mrs. Hurst rolled her eyes. “Harvey? Please.” It was time for lunch.
Mrs. Hurst and Mrs. Medcalf had initially planned to hold passata day in mid-February, near the end of Australia’s summer, to coincide with what would have been their mother’s 100th birthday. But they pushed the date back because flooding in the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is the capital, had delayed the widespread availability of Roma tomatoes, the long, small variety favored in Australia for passata.
They went ahead with a tribute dinner, however, cooking dishes that Mrs. Luciani, who died in 2013, had often prepared when the sisters were growing up. As a special touch, they used some of the cooking utensils their mother had carried with her on the slow trip from Naples to Melbourne, via Fremantle in Western Australia, on the TN Roma migrant ship in May 1957.
Mr. Luciani, who died in 2007, had arrived 15 months earlier on another ship, the Surriento. As Mrs. Luciani and their firstborn, Guido, waited for news back home, Mr. Luciani found work on the gearbox line at one of Australia’s last local automobile plants. Once reunited, the family would grow to five with the births of the sisters three years apart.
In 1970, they moved to a new home farther out in the Melbourne suburbs. Mrs. Luciani, who would find work as a housekeeper, appropriated the laundry area for her pasta-making, often by hand but sometimes using a machine.
“As teenagers we were forced to help. We’d be turning the machine and rolling our eyes,” Mrs. Hurst said. “I wish we had paid more attention!”
The sisters vividly recall their strict, old-fashioned upbringing, with family matters placed above all else. The Lucianis were not unlike many “New Australian” families — non-British migrants who arrived after the war as Australia worked to increase its population for security and development, welcoming people from southern Europe it had previously shunned.
The parents were frugal but loved sharing what they had, particularly what they had grown or made themselves. Although they loved what Australia offered, they insisted on replicating aspects of their former lives.
It wasn’t unusual, for example, for a Sunday roast chicken to have been handpicked in the morning from the coop at their home, its neck broken, the bird drained of blood and its feathers plucked, before being seasoned and slid into an oven hours later.
The sisters were commandeered to help during the annual passata day and other family gatherings, where wine would flow and, inevitably, someone would break out an accordion. Neighbors would grow to love and become regulars at the events, but there was also derision, common in Australia at the time, directed at the girls’ lunches, for example.
“There was a sense of shame,” Mrs. Hurst said. “We went to a very Anglo-Saxon high school, and there was only a small bunch of Italians and a few Greeks. We just wanted to fit in. We wanted to be normal and eat what everyone else was.”
The sisters laugh about it now, agreeing that their trials had helped them become strong, independent and open-minded, influenced equally by their Italian and Australian lives. On passata day and other occasions, they take immense pleasure in opening their homes and sharing, as their parents did.
“That was our life. Seeing your family, cooking food and enjoying it, and having a laugh and a wine. That was everything,” Mrs. Medcalf said. “Now, that’s how we show our love, by cooking for people and having them over.”
“That’s our love language,” Mrs. Hurst added.
