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Southern Tomato Pie
For one pie, peel and slice green tomatoes, add four table-spoons vinegar, one of butter, three of sugar; flavor with nutmeg or cinnamon; bake with two crusts slowly. This tastes very much like a green apple pie. -Mrs. Ceba Hull.
A mock apple pie built on unripe tomatoes, written in the compressed style of a community cookbook that assumed you already knew how to fill a pie plate. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- How many tomatoesThe original never says. A 9-inch double-crust pie takes about 4 cups of sliced green tomatoes, roughly 1.5 lb, or four to five medium fruit. Slice them thin, no more than 1/4 inch, or they stay firm while the crust browns.
- Bake slowly means 325-350FBake slowly -- 'slow' in period usage is generally reckoned at roughly 300-325F, though the term was never precise. What matters is giving the tomato slices long enough to soften through: figure on 50-60 minutes, until the filling bubbles at the vents.
- The sugar is low by modern tasteThree tablespoons against four of vinegar makes a sharply sour pie. Modern green tomato pie recipes generally call for much more, often 3/4 to 1 cup for this quantity; taste a slice of raw tomato with a pinch of sugar and vinegar and judge from there.
- It needs a thickenerGreen tomatoes shed a great deal of liquid and the recipe supplies nothing to bind it, so the filling will flood the crust. Two to three tablespoons of flour, or a scant two of cornstarch, tossed with the sugar before filling will hold it.
- The butterOne tablespoon is customarily dotted over the filling before the top crust goes on rather than stirred in, though the recipe says only to add it. It is there for richness and gloss rather than structure.
- VinegarCider vinegar was the common household vinegar in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and it suits the apple comparison better than distilled white. Four tablespoons is assertive; three is plenty if your tomatoes are very small and tart.
- SpiceNutmeg or cinnamon, the recipe says: a scant teaspoon of cinnamon or a quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. A grating of lemon zest is not in the original but pushes the flavor further toward apple.
- Yield and servingOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. It cuts best fully cooled, since the filling firms as it sets; warm it in slices if you want it hot.
Green tomato pie belongs to a family of mock fruit pies that ran through American home cooking in the nineteenth century, alongside vinegar pie, mock apple pie made with crackers, and mock mince made with green tomatoes as well. The logic is seasonal rather than economical in the abstract: a frost was coming, the vines were still loaded with fruit that would never ripen, and acid plus sugar plus warm spice turns an unripe tomato into something close to a tart cooking apple, which is exactly the claim Mrs. Hull makes at the end of her entry. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio and first published in the 1870s, is built from hundreds of such signed contributions from named women, and the terseness here is typical of the form: the contributor is writing for readers who have made a two-crust pie many times and need only the filling. The label "Southern" is loose in books of this kind and generally signals a regional attribution passed along with the recipe rather than any documented origin.