What does “passato di pomodoro” mean in Italian?
Gioco di parole con l’elettricista e il pomodoro
B2 Italian listening practice · Italian · Picked for people who know more
Passato is one past participle doing two jobs. In a kitchen, un passato is something pushed through a sieve: passato di pomodoro is tomato purée, passato di verdura a smooth vegetable soup. In a grammar book, il passato is the past tense. Read the same three words the second way and you are being asked, quite seriously, to conjugate a tomato.
Which is what the clip does, inventing the verb pomodorare and running it through the passato remoto: io pomodorai, tu pomodorasti, egli pomodorò, noi pomodorammo, voi pomodoraste, essi pomodorarono. Those endings — -ai, -asti, -ò, -ammo, -aste, -arono — are the genuine article for any -are verb, so the gag doubles as a conjugation drill. (The bottled supermarket version is usually la passata, feminine; il passato leans thicker and soupier.)
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These words are harder than B2. Here is what they mean.
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.