Stocking up for the long hard Winter that never comes

Nordic cuisine involves complex smoking processes, canning and preserving - all ways of saving food through the rigorous often food less winters. Not everyone is a fisherman who can carve a hole through the ice to get some fresh fish, or a hunter stalking through large snow capped coniferous forests in the hopes of an elusive creature to skin and cook.

The Italian climate is a lot kinder to nature. Each season provides its bounty: beautiful mushrooms and chestnuts in the autumn, citrus fruit in the winter, greens for the Spring and masses of tomatoes in the summer. Not to mention the plentiful grapes and olives that grow all over the peninsula. Yet each region of Italy will be busy pickling and preserving at various stages of the year.

This is the moment for bottling the last of the summer tomatoes. Various cookery magazines give their tips and advice on the best ways to go about this. Do you want a rough sauce or a silky smooth sauce? How is it best to crush your tomatoes: in a processor in an old fashioned hand-cranked mouli? - which then adds the question of which size holes should the tomatoes be moulied through? 

Do you want added flavours such as a hint of garlic, some basil or something more herbaceous with some flat parsley? Should you use a jar, a bottle and of course what is the best method of sterilising your chosen container? For this last most seem to opt for boiling the filled container.

The question of preserving tomatoes in the shape of 'passatas' (tomato sauces which can be smooth or chunky) or whole in oil or sun-dried seems a tad overdone in a country where you can buy them ready made and of premium quality. Why go to the trouble?
Because the final result is always better than the factory produced alternative considering that most of the produce has not been force mass-produced in a greenhouse under artificial conditions. There are no additives, just genuine freshness and flavour. There are also different types of tomatoes to choose from: pomodorini, torpedini, a grappolo etc... an endless well of freshness and taste.

It's also pesto season. The leaves on the basil are wilting, the plants are producing their little white flowers, it's time to harvest. On the town markets basil is sold in large one euro bunches, and while Roman basil will not be the same as that grown in Liguria, lacking its original 'terroir', it is still good enough to make an optimal pesto or if you omit the nuts, a provençal pistou.

Then there are the jams, the marmellate, which food magazines encourage readers to make. Thus, they can take advantage of the soft velvety flavours of summer peaches and apricots as well as the early autumn plums. It's as if the new growing season were months and months away at the end of a long and difficult winter à la Helsinki. It isn't. 
In the Northern, Alpine regions, the winters may be suitably wintery but in Rome the temperatures barely dip down to zero, in February. Balcony herbs are unaffected and plants, unless they encounter snow, grow on as usual. There is no dearth of fresh produce ever.