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Fried Tomatoes
Peel tomatoes and cut crosswise in large slices, salt and pepper, dip each slice into wheat flour, then into beaten egg, and fry at once in hot lard; serve hot. A cup of milk is sometimes thickened with a little flour and butter, boiled and poured over them. - Estelle Woods Wilcox.
A straightforward skillet dish, but two details in the original will decide whether the coating stays on the tomato or slides into the fat.
- Choose firm fruitFully ripe slicing tomatoes shed juice and are apt to collapse. Tomatoes that are just barely ripe, or slightly green, hold together better. The recipe asks only for "large slices" cut crosswise and does not give a thickness; about half an inch is a workable modern reading.
- Peeling is optionalPeeling was the usual nineteenth-century direction for sliced tomatoes, and may reflect tougher skins on the varieties then grown. Modern tomatoes need not be peeled, though a 30-second dip in boiling water will loosen the skin if you want to follow the original.
- Flour then eggThe order given here is deliberate and worth keeping: flour first gives the egg something to grip. Blot the slices dry before flouring or the coating will not adhere.
- Fry at onceThe phrase carries weight. Coated slices left standing weep and the crust turns to paste, so the fat should already be hot, around 350-375F, before the first slice is dipped.
- LardLard is still sold and gives the crispest result. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works; butter alone will brown too fast. About a quarter inch of fat in a heavy skillet is enough.
- The milk sauceThis is a small white sauce: cook roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour together, whisk in a cup of milk, simmer until it coats a spoon, then season. Pour it over at the table rather than in the pan, or the crust softens.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Roughly two pounds of tomatoes, five or six medium, fries up as a side for four. Fry in batches and hold uncovered in a low oven; covering traps steam.
Estelle Woods Wilcox edited Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, published in Minneapolis in 1877 and drawing on the earlier Ohio-based Centennial Buckeye collection, from contributions gathered largely among Ohio and upper-Midwest households, and this recipe carries her own name rather than a contributor's. Fried tomatoes belong to the late-summer glut: tomatoes ripened faster than a household could eat or can them, and frying used up both the firm early fruit and the last of the crop before frost. The dish is often associated today with the American South, but its appearance here, in an unremarkable spot among the vegetables, is a reminder of how routinely egg-and-flour frying turns up in nineteenth-century American cooking. The optional milk sauce poured over the top appears to be much the same thickened-milk gravy that these books seem to apply to other dishes as well.