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Dredged Tomatoes
Choose smooth, solid tomatoes, the little end ripe. Cut into slices an eighth of an inch thick, dust with salt and pepper. Beat an egg in a saucer, add a tablespoonful of boiling water. Dip each slice in egg, then in bread crumbs. When ready to serve the tomatoes put two or three tablespoonfuls of lard or drippings in a frying-pan,
A plain breaded fried tomato, and the text as printed breaks off mid-sentence at the frying pan — the finish is missing. What survives is enough to work from, since the method is the standard one: hot shallow fat, one turn, serve at once.
- The missing endingThe original stops after the fat goes into the pan. Get the fat hot enough that a crumb sizzles on contact, lay the slices in without crowding, and turn once — roughly 2 to 3 minutes a side, until the crust is set and browned. Longer and the slice collapses into the coating.
- "The little end ripe"Most likely the blossom end, opposite the stem, should be ripe while the rest of the fruit is still firm; the recipe does not explain the phrase. The point is structural: a fully soft tomato weeps and will not hold a slice an eighth of an inch thick. Underripe or a firm slicing variety works better than a dead-ripe heirloom.
- Eighth-inch slicesA deliberately thin cut: thin slices cook through in the time the crumb takes to colour. Thick slices give you a raw-tasting interior under a burnt crust.
- The tablespoon of boiling waterAdded to the beaten egg it thins the wash so it clings in a thin film rather than a thick custard. It does not cook the egg at that ratio. Cold water does much the same job.
- Bread crumbsDry, fine crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse panko or the sandy canned crumbs sold today. Grate or process crustless stale bread and sift out the lumps.
- Lard or drippingsBoth are still the right choice for flavour and smoke point. Two or three tablespoons in a wide pan gives shallow frying, not deep — the slices sit in fat, they do not swim. Any neutral oil substitutes without trouble.
- Salt before crumbingThe recipe dusts with salt and pepper before the egg and crumbs. Salting draws moisture to the cut surface, so do not let salted slices stand; they will be too wet for the egg to grip.
- YieldTwo large tomatoes and one egg will coat enough slices for three or four as a side. Fry in batches and hold uncovered in a warm oven — covered, the crust steams soft.
Fried tomatoes in an egg-and-crumb coat appear in American vegetable cookery from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, by which time the tomato was an ordinary garden crop. The verb dredged here carries its kitchen sense of drawing a food through a dry coating; the related dredging box, a perforated flour or spice shaker, was common kitchen equipment, though the word came into cookery before the box rather than from it. Instructions like this one also suit a practical problem of the season: gardens produced tomatoes faster than households could eat them fresh, and firm, not-quite-ripe fruit that would not do for salad suited a frying pan. Fried green tomatoes are often explained by the same logic, though the dish's own history is less settled.