Everyday Friends & Family

For a while now, Marczyk Fine Foods is one of a few grocers in the United States to carry an exceptionally delicious, jarred tomato from Masseria Mirogallo in Basilicata, the "instep" to the Italian Boot.

I've been cooking with the three renditions of these tomatoes for a few years now — the whole peeled, the sliced (called "spaccatelle") and a delicious "passata" or purée — and they blow out of the stockpot any canned tomato that I've ever used, even pricier versions. And they contain none of the preservative called calcium chloride that's used in many canned (especially cut up) tomatoes

(Calcium chloride isn't dangerous at all, but it firms up the cell walls of the tomato and, hence, keeps the canned mash from becoming mushy. But it keeps doing that even when the canned tomatoes are cooked, interfering with the breakdown of the tomatoes into a sauce-like form. If you want smooth, go for processed tomatoes free of forms of calcium, such as Masseria Mirogallo's.)

Masseria Mirogallo farms 70-acres of exceptionally fecund earth that has been worked by the same family since the 1800s and a strictly minimalist manner of preserving the fruits of that land. (For example, each tomato in the "whole peeled" version is skinned and packed into its jar by hand — in this mechanized day, think of that! — with no more than a smidge of added salt.)

The farm makes its many pickles and pastes using merely what vegetables are given it by the land, perhaps quickly blanching one in white vinegar, straining it, then topping its pieces with the farm's extra virgin olive oil, perhaps cooking down peppers or artichoke hearts with little more than lemon juice and salt, then whipping the mass into a meltingly smooth, thick cream.