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Fried Green Tomatoes
Wash and cut the tomatoes into slices about an eighth of an inch in thickness, dry each slice carefully with a soft towel, then dust with salt and pepper. Beat an egg in a saucer until light, add to it a tablespoonful of boiling water. Dip each slice first in this and then in bread crumbs. Put two or three tablespoonfuls of lard or dripping in a frying pan; when very hot, cover the bottom of the pan with the slices of tomatoes; fry brown on one side, then turn and brown the other. Take them up carefully with a cake turner, place on a heated dish and pour over them Sauce Hollandaise. Very good.
A straightforward pan-fry that depends almost entirely on dry tomato slices and properly hot fat. Two details in the original are easy to skim past and both matter.
- Dry the slices, seriouslyGreen tomatoes are firm but wet, and surface moisture is what makes coating slide off in the pan. Blot each slice on both sides and salt it just before breading rather than well ahead, or the salt will draw out more liquid.
- Slice thicknessAn eighth of an inch is thinner than green tomatoes are usually cut for frying today; something nearer a quarter inch is the more common modern cut and holds its shape better under the sauce. The thinner slice fries crisper, with less of the tomato left.
- The tablespoon of boiling waterThis thins the beaten egg so it coats rather than clings in a thick layer. Add it in a stream while whisking; a whole tablespoon dumped into a single egg at once can set small threads of cooked white.
- Lard or drippingBoth still work and both are better than butter here, which will brown before the crumb does. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point is a fair substitute; the pan wants a shallow film, not deep fat.
- Bread crumbs, not cornmealDry, fine white crumbs are what is meant here, not coarse panko and not the cornmeal coating common in modern Southern versions of the dish.
- "Very hot" pan, medium heat afterGet the fat shimmering before the first slice goes in, then hold at a steady medium. Too cool and the crumb absorbs fat; too hot and the coating colours before the tomato softens. Roughly two to three minutes a side.
- Don't crowd'Cover the bottom of the pan' is best read as a single layer; slices packed tight against one another steam, and steam undoes all the drying.
- YieldSliced this thin, two large green tomatoes make a good many slices, enough for three or four as a side.
- The sauceHollandaise on fried tomatoes is rich; a thin, sharp version with plenty of lemon suits better than a thick one. Serve at once, as the coating loses its crispness under sauce within a few minutes.
Green tomatoes appear in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century as a practical answer to a real problem: a frost coming, or a plant still loaded with fruit that will not ripen. Frying them was one solution among many, alongside green tomato pickle, mincemeat and pie. The dish's strong modern association with the American South appears to be largely a twentieth-century development, and this version — bread crumbs rather than cornmeal, finished with Hollandaise — reads as the genteel cookery of the period, in which a French sauce marked out a dish taken seriously. If the book is one of hot weather cookery, the choice fits: a quick pan-fry keeps the kitchen fire small and short-lived, which mattered a great deal in a house with a coal or wood range in August.