Source: Radio New Zealand
The tomatoes contain little seeds and are acid-free. Supplied
Red, bell-bottomed tomatoes with green crowns growing on sprawling vines in a glasshouse along Wellington’s south coast help keep Nina and her mother Teresa Cuccurullo connected to their heritage.
The Island Bay family has been growing tomatoes originally sourced from seeds brought over from the Italian island of Capri in the 1960s, for more than six decades.
It is a rich tradition first started by Teresa’s father Luigi Ruocco and carried on by her husband Antonio, before daughter Nina took it up after his death.
“It’s part of our history and it’s a time where you think about your grandparents,” Nina told Country Life. “I think about my father and [how] we are now getting it out to the rest of the community and to the family.
“It’s great to see how some of the younger people are starting to grow these tomatoes too, because then that legacy has continued.”
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Their family was part of the “chain migration” from Italy to the Wellington suburb of Island Bay last century, Nina explained.
“They were coming here to better themselves, to start new families,” she said. “Nonno was one of the early ones in the 1920s, but there were others before him that were here as well.”
She said the family maintained its Italian identity by gathering as a community through its Catholic faith, via the cultural group known as Club Garibaldi, or by keeping up with family traditions – like eating octopus and tomato salad at Christmas time.
Nina Cuccurullo and mother Teresa Cuccurullo, who continue the family legacy of growing capri tomatoes first brought back from Italy by Teresa’s father in the 1960s. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
Food is also key to feeding their heritage. Particularly growing tomatoes to be used to make passata.
“The sauce is central to all the other food because … that’s the sauce for the macaroni, it’s the sauce for the lasagna, the ravioli, the parmigiana. So the sauce is used quite a lot in the cooking and that’s why it was sort of bottled so it could be used during the year.”
Nina said the type of tomatoes they grew were “quite identifiable”, mostly through their distinctive shape.
“They’re an elongated shape, and they sort of go a little bit green at the top. There’s not much seeds in them, and they’re acid-free, and the skin is quite thin, so it’s not a thick skin.”
The tomatoes had a distinctive, elongated shape with a green crown on top. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
They harvest the seeds from each season’s crop to keep the variety alive – growing them in the glasshouse to avoid cross-pollination with other tomato varieties.
“We get the best tomatoes on the crop – the bigger ones,” Teresa told Country Life. “Let them ripen on the stem, bring them in, cut them, take out all the seeds that there are – it’s not many – and separate them.”
The seeds are then put through a sieve to separate them from the membrane before being placed on the window sill to dry for the next summer.
For over a decade, Nina Cuccurullo has been growing tomatoes from her glasshouse in the Wellington suburb of Island Bay. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
Nothing goes to waste, Teresa said.
“All the pieces that you’ve cut up to get the seeds, they can be made into a sauce.”
They share the seeds with friends, family and others in the wider community to help keep them going – and also sell small plants during the peak growing period.
Nina said it was a privilege to be able to continue the legacy first started by her grandfather, and carried on by her father.
She said he loved being out in the garden.
“As well as a vegetable gardener, he was a very good flower gardener.
“He had a lot of plants, up to about 60 inside the glass house, and then quite a few more outside. So he was kept very, very busy.
“It was a passion. He was happy there.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand