Home › Vegetables › Tomatoes on the Half Shell
Tomatoes on the Half Shell
IOI when very hot, cover the bottom with slices of tomatoes, fry brown on both sides. Lift carefully, put on a heated dish and serve at once.
If kept warm any length of time, they lose their crispness and become soft.
The text as printed is a fragment: the opening line, which would have named the pan and the fat and told you to heat them, is missing, and the recipe number has come through as "IOI" rather than 101. What survives is still workable, and the instruction that matters is in the last sentence.
- The missing first lineThe recipe begins mid-sentence. "When very hot" presumably refers to a pan and fat heated before the tomatoes go in, but the surviving text does not say which fat or how much, so use enough to film the pan generously.
- The hinge: serve immediatelyThe final sentence is the whole point. Fried tomato slices lose their crispness quickly, and steam trapped under them on a warm plate softens them. Plate and carry them straight to the table, and do not stack or cover them.
- Slice thicknessAround half an inch. Thinner slices collapse before they colour; thicker ones stay watery in the centre while the cut faces brown.
- Firm, underripe fruitThis style of frying was written for tomatoes that hold together. Dead-ripe supermarket tomatoes will slump. Choose fruit that is still firm at the shoulders, or use green tomatoes.
- Salt at the endSalting the slices before they hit the pan draws out water and prevents browning. Season them on the hot plate instead.
- Don't crowd the pan"Cover the bottom with slices" means a single layer with the pieces touching, not overlapping. Two batches in a large skillet beat one crowded one, since a full pan drops the heat and the tomatoes stew.
- The title"Tomatoes on the Half Shell" is used elsewhere for halved tomatoes served in their skins, which does not match these instructions for plain pan-fried slices. Either the heading has drifted from its recipe in typesetting, or the book is using the phrase loosely.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. As a rough guide, a couple of medium tomatoes will fill a large skillet and serve two as a side or breakfast dish.
Fried tomatoes are often associated with the American breakfast and supper table of the nineteenth century, when the tomato had finally shaken off its long reputation as ornamental and suspect and become an everyday garden crop. Pan-frying suited a household with a hot range surface and a glut of fruit that would not keep: it used up the firm and the not-quite-ripe as readily as the perfect ones. The technique comes down to a few clipped lines like these, with the warning about crispness the one point the cook is told to watch.