Home › Cookery › Fried Tomatoes
Fried Tomatoes
Slice tomatoes one-quarter inch thick. Put them in a skillet in which a spoonful of nice lard has been melted. After getting hot, the skins of the tomatoes may be removed: Sprinkle with salt and pepper, take the tomatoes out, thicken the gravy with a teacup cream in which a teaspoonful flour has been stirred. Put the tomatoes in a dish and pour the gravy over them. Serve hot.--Mrs. C. L. T.
An unbreaded fried tomato, closer to a quick sauté with a cream pan sauce than to the cornmeal-crusted version most people expect. A few conventions in the wording need translating.
- A teacupIn American cookbooks of this period a teacup is reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, roughly 6 fl oz — smaller than the breakfast cup or the modern measuring cup. Use 3/4 cup cream with the teaspoon of flour whisked in smooth before it goes near the heat.
- A spoonful of lardRead this as a generous tablespoon. It is enough to film a skillet, not to shallow-fry; the tomatoes are meant to sizzle and soften, not swim. Butter or oil works, though lard gives the savoury edge the original assumes.
- Peeling in the panThe instruction to remove the skins after the slices get hot is the practical heart of the method. Heat loosens the skin from the flesh so it can be lifted off with a fork or tongs, which is easier than blanching and peeling whole tomatoes first.
- Ripe, not greenNothing here suggests green tomatoes — there is no coating and no long cooking. Use firm ripe fruit, cut a full quarter inch thick so the slices hold together, and turn them once.
- Don't crowd or overcookTomatoes give up a great deal of water. Fry in a single layer in batches; if they are piled in they steam and collapse before they colour.
- The gravyThe flour-and-cream mixture goes into the pan drippings after the tomatoes come out. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir constantly for a minute or two until it thickens — cream plus tomato acid will curdle if it is boiled hard.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper go on in the pan, which draws out juice that becomes part of the sauce. Taste the finished gravy again; cream flattens salt.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of tomatoes; three or four medium ones with the teacup of cream should serve about four as a side dish. Serve immediately, on a warmed platter — the slices weep and the sauce thins as they stand.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is a book of household receipts many of which are attributed, and the initials at the end are the point: a great many dishes carry the initials or name of the contributor who vouched for them. Fried tomatoes belong to the late-summer glut, when the crop came in faster than it could be eaten fresh, and the pan-drippings-and-cream finish is the same thrifty logic that produced cream gravy for chicken and ham in the same kitchens — nothing left in the skillet is wasted. Worth noting that the batter-fried green tomato now taken as the emblem of Southern cooking appears to be largely a later, twentieth-century fixture; nineteenth-century books like this one more often fry the ripe fruit plain and sauce it.