Tomato Pie
Slice green tomatoes and stew in a thick syrup of sugar and lemon juice. Grate in the yellow rind of a lemon. When transparent, spread evenly over the bottom of a pie-plate that has been lined with paste. Spread strips of pastry across or cut into ornamental leaves with a cake-cutter, place over the fruit and bake.--Mrs. S. T.
A sweet pie, not a savory one: the tomatoes are candied in lemon syrup before they ever meet the crust. The recipe assumes you know how to run an oven and gives no temperature, time, or quantity, so the numbers below are the ones a modern cook needs.
- The hinge: stew until transparentEverything depends on cooking the slices in the syrup until they turn translucent, which may take half an hour or so over low heat. Underdone slices stay opaque and mealy and will weep into the crust.
- Working quantitiesFor one 9-inch pie, figure about 2 lb firm green tomatoes, sliced 1/4 inch thick, with 1 1/2 cups sugar, the juice of two lemons and the grated zest of one. Serves 6 to 8.
- "A thick syrup"Dissolve the sugar in the lemon juice with only a splash of water and let it reduce; the tomatoes release a good deal of liquid as they cook, so a syrup that looks too stiff at the start will loosen. If it is still thin when the slices go transparent, lift them out and boil the syrup down before filling the shell.
- Green tomatoes, not unripe red onesUse hard, fully green fruit. Half-ripened tomatoes collapse into sauce and bring a raw-tomato flavor that the sugar does not mask.
- "Paste" means pastryNineteenth-century Virginia cookbooks use paste for what we call pie dough. Blind-baking the bottom shell for 12 minutes is worth doing, since the filling goes in wet and warm.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the lattice, then 375F for 20 to 25 minutes until the strips are browned and the syrup bubbles.
- The lattice and the cake-cutter"Strips of pastry across" is a plain lattice; the recipe cuts the ornamental leaves with a cake-cutter, one of the tin cutters of the period. A small cookie cutter or a paring knife does the same work.
- Cool before cuttingThe syrup thickens only as it cools. Cut the pie warm and the filling runs; give it two hours at room temperature.
Green tomato pie belongs to the practical end of American fruit cookery: at the close of the season a gardener is left with fruit that will never ripen, and stewing it in sugar and lemon turns it into something close to a green-apple or mock-mince filling. Firm and acid, green tomatoes hold their slices in syrup much as quince or unripe pears do, and the lemon zest supplies the perfume the tomato lacks. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, is full of such credited receipts, and the terse "Mrs. S. T." signature is characteristic of the book's method: recipes were gathered from working kitchens and printed with the shorthand and the assumed knowledge of the women who wrote them. Omission of oven temperatures and quantities was in any case general in cookbooks of the period.