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Fried Tomatoes
Wash and cut in halves six nice, ripe tomatoes, place them in a baking-pan skin side down. Cut a quarter of a pound of butter into small pieces, place over the tomatoes, dust with salt and pepper, stand in the oven ten minutes. Then place them over a fire and fry slowly; the tomatoes should become tender without turning. When done, lift them carefully with a cake turner and place them on a heated dish. Draw the baking-pan over a quick fire, stir until the butter is brown, add two tablespoonfuls of flour, mix until smooth, add a pint of milk, stir continually until boiling, season with salt and pepper, pour over the tomatoes and serve. Tomatoes in this way make a nice lunch or tea dish and will take the place of a meat dish.
A two-stage method: the tomatoes soften in the oven, then finish in their own butter on the stovetop, and the pan drippings become a brown-butter cream gravy. The only real trick is resisting the urge to turn them.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not describe the oven as hot or slow. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400-425F, is a reasonable guess for the ten-minute start; the point is to soften the halves and render the butter, not to roast them dry.
- Do not turn themThe instruction to cook them tender "without turning" is the hinge. Cut side up in butter, they hold together; flipped, ripe halves collapse and weep into the pan. A wide, thin spatula and a light hand at the end.
- "Fry slowly" on a modern burnerMedium-low, and expect ten to twenty minutes depending on how ripe the fruit is. A quarter pound of butter in a pan of tomatoes is closer to a shallow braise than a fry.
- One pan throughoutThe baking pan goes straight onto the burner, so use cast iron or a heavy metal roasting pan, not glass or ceramic, which will crack on direct heat.
- A quarter pound of butterThat is one stick, 4 oz, for six tomatoes. Halving it gives plenty of fat to fry in and still leaves enough browned butter for the sauce.
- A pint of milkTwo cups, whole milk. With only two tablespoons of flour this makes a thin, pourable gravy; if you want it to coat, use three or reduce the milk to a cup and a half.
- Browning the butter"Quick fire" means high heat. Take the butter to a nut-brown, not black, then add the flour off the worst of the heat and cook it a minute before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- YieldTwelve halves, serving four as the light supper dish the recipe intends, three if it is the whole meal. Serve on a warmed platter, as directed; the sauce cools fast.
Fried tomatoes belong to what looks like an American habit of treating vegetables as the center of a light meal, and the closing line is the giveaway: the dish "will take the place of a meat dish" at lunch or tea. Meatless suppers could be a matter of economy and of the informal evening tea table, though principled vegetarianism was also current in the period. The milk gravy built in the pan drippings is the same cream-gravy logic applied to fried chicken and pork chops, borrowed here for a vegetable so that the plate reads as substantial. Ripe tomatoes rather than green ones also point to high summer, when a household with a garden had more than it could use; green fried tomatoes, the better-known dish now, are often said to have been the answer to the opposite problem of fruit that would not ripen before frost.