For the Baldino family of Oyster Bay, summer means tomatoes.
Each year, the family gathers at Carmela Baldino’s home for a day of washing, boiling and crushing tomatoes into sauce that they bottle as well, and that will supply the family for the year ahead.
This year’s sauce-making day is scheduled for Saturday, when roughly 20 family members are expected to take part in a tradition that Baldino began with her children decades ago, and has since grown to include spouses and grandchildren.
Baldino, 83, who grew up in Durazzano, Italy, a small town about 20 miles from Naples, came to the United States with her three sisters in February 1959. She and her husband, Philip, began making sauce with his parents after they married in 1964, and later she continued the tradition with her children, Giovanna, Louie, Mario and Donna.
“They were small, but as they grew up, we all did it together, and that’s been since 1986,” Carmela said. “Myself and my children, we did it together.”
And the sauce-making gathering has expanded as the children married and had kids of their own.
The process begins before most of the family arrives. On Friday night, Philip will set up large tables, including one in the garage, while the couple prepare the equipment needed for the following morning. The work will begin at 7 a.m. on Saturday, though the Baldinos will be up by 5:30, getting the water boiling and preparing the outdoor work area.
The family receives 23 cases of tomatoes on Thursday, each weighing roughly 55 pounds. The tomatoes will be washed and inspected, with rotten tomatoes discarded or, if the rot is minimal, the damaged portions cut away.
The tomatoes are then boiled until their skins crack, before being drained and put through a machine that separates the sauce from the skin and other material. The sauce is collected in large pots, some holding as much as 20 quarts, before being cooked over gas burners. Carmela watches the pots closely, stirring them to keep the sauce from sticking and adjusting the cooking time depending on the tomatoes.
“If the tomatoes are more watery,” she explained, “we will have to cook the sauce a little longer so it becomes thick.”
While the sauce cooks, family members prepares the jars. Two or three basil leaves are added to each jar before the hot sauce is ladled in.
After the jars are filled and sealed, they are placed in crates lined with hot towels and blankets. The jars remain covered for two or three days as they cool.
For Carmela and Philip’s son Lou Baldino, 58, the tradition has been part of his life for as long as he can remember. As a child, Lou recounted, his responsibilities were limited primarily to washing tomatoes and helping operate the crushing machine. Now he is part of the assembly line that fills and seals the jars.
“The hardest parts are just maintaining watching the tomato sauce as they boil, and once they’re boiling, you got to jar them,” Lou said. “If you if you spill it, you get third-degree burns.”
The family has developed a rhythm over the years, he explained, with each person taking responsibility for different parts of the process.
The day is about more than making enough sauce to last through the year, of course. It is a Baldino family gathering that has become a tradition in its own right.
“It’s very fun. It’s a very fun day,” Lou said. “We all look forward to it, and I’m sure I’ll appreciate it as I get older much more.”
He added that the family plays Italian music, jokes and eats together, with the day stretching from early morning until late at night. “It’s like having a Sunday dinner at home. It’s just extended,” he said.
The Baldinos’ granddaughter Monica Bizzoso-Doyle, 30, of Jupiter, Fla., grew up taking part in the tradition, and became more actively involved as a teenager. Some of her earliest memories are of sitting inside the garage and watching her family work outside.
She eventually found a favorite task: preparing the all-important basil. “It just smelled so good,” Bizzoso-Doyle said. “I remember my fingers would be stained green from plucking it, but they would smell like basil for, like, a week.”
Busy in Florida, Bizzoso-Doyle was unable to return to Long Island for this year’s gathering, but she said she hoped to continue the tradition with her own family someday, and added that she would “fly my butt back to New York” if necessary to keep the tradition alive.
The event continues to connect family members to generations of their Italian heritage. Bizzoso-Doyle said she remembered sitting in the lap of her paternal great-grandmother Maria, who lived to be 111 and died in 2021. Lou said the day of sauce-making emphasized the importance of maintaining cultural traditions.
“It’s in our DNA,” he said, “and I’m proud to be part of it.”
At the end of a long day on Saturday, the family will gather around a long table in the driveway for dinner, ladling the freshly made sauce onto pasta and enjoying other dishes prepared by Carmela. It will culminate a day that combines work, food, music and memories.”
“Everyone’s in a great mood.” Bizzoso-Doyle said. “We don’t run out of steam at that point, either. No one’s sitting at the dinner table tired.”
