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Tomato Fritters
Leave the skins on the tomatoes for fritters, as it serves to hold it together; slice in rather thick slices; then dip each slice in beaten egg and cracker crumbs and fry in hot butter. This is a nice breakfast dish.
A one-paragraph recipe that assumes you already know how to pan-fry. The variables it leaves out — tomato ripeness, slice thickness, fat temperature — are the whole difference between crisp and soggy.
- Use underripe fruitFirm, barely ripe or green tomatoes hold their shape and shed less water; a dead-ripe summer tomato collapses into the crumbs. "Rather thick" is not defined here; slices of about half an inch are a reasonable modern reading.
- Salt and drain firstThe recipe skips this, but salting the slices and letting them sit on a rack ten minutes draws out surface moisture so the coating adheres. Blot dry before dipping.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs meant crushed plain soda or water crackers, coarser and less sweet than commercial breadcrumbs. Saltines crushed to a rough sand are the closest match; panko gives a lighter but less authentic crust.
- Flour before eggDipping in egg and then crumbs alone will slip on a wet tomato. A light dusting of seasoned flour first gives the egg something to grip.
- Butter burnsWhole butter over the heat needed for a crisp crust will brown and go bitter. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, holds up; keep the fat around 350F and work in batches so it does not drop.
- TimingTwo to three minutes a side is enough. Longer and the tomato turns to pulp inside a coating that is already dark.
- YieldTwo medium tomatoes give about eight to ten slices, enough for two at breakfast. Fry to order and serve immediately; they do not hold.
Fried tomato slices belong to the long American habit of treating the tomato as a vegetable to be cooked rather than a salad fruit. Calling them "fritters" stretches the word, which usually implies a batter, but nineteenth-century cookbooks applied it loosely to almost anything egged, crumbed and fried. The instruction to leave the skins on is the practical heart of the entry: skinned slices fall apart in the pan. Recipes of this kind were filed under breakfast rather than dinner, in a period when the morning meal was substantial.