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Fried Tomatoes
Cut tomatoes in quarters lengthwise; season with salt and pepper, dip in batter, and fry in deep fat.
Sautéd Tomatoes Slice tomatoes; season with salt and pepper. Dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and sauté in hot frying pan. Serve on hot buttered toast.
Two brief methods from a book that assumes you already know its batter and its frying rules. Both stand or fall on the tomatoes themselves: use firm, underripe or green fruit, since a dead-ripe tomato collapses into the coating.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives none. Period books commonly judge deep fat by a cube of bread browning in under a minute, which corresponds roughly to the mid-300sF; too cool and the batter drinks fat, too hot and it colors before the tomato heats through.
- "Dip in batter"No batter is given here; the book assumes its own standard fritter batter elsewhere in the volume. Whatever is used should coat a spoon thickly and fall in a ribbon.
- Salt in advance is the trapSalting draws water to the surface within a few minutes and batter slides off wet tomato. Season, blot dry with a towel, then coat and fry immediately.
- Crumbs, egg and crumbsThat sequence is deliberate and still correct: a dry crumb layer first gives the beaten egg something to grip on a slick cut surface, and the second crumb layer forms the crust.
- Sauté pan and fatSaute pan and fat -- the recipe says only "hot frying pan." A heavy skillet with enough butter or drippings to keep the crumbs from sticking, hot enough to sizzle on contact; a few minutes a side is enough, since longer and the slice goes to pulp inside its crust.
- ThicknessCut sautéed slices a generous third of an inch. Thin slices lose their structure before the crumbs brown.
- YieldNeither version gives a quantity. Reckon one medium tomato per person as a vegetable course, two if it is the whole of a light supper on toast.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its chocolate chapters it carried a full general household repertoire so the volume could sit in the kitchen year-round. Fried and sautéed tomatoes belong to an American habit of using the hard, underripe fruit at either end of the season, when a tomato was too firm and acid to slice raw but took to a crumb crust well; the practice appears in nineteenth-century Northern and Midwestern cookbooks long before green tomatoes became a Southern signature. Serving the slices on buttered toast, as the second method directs, was a common way of stretching a vegetable into a breakfast or luncheon dish and of catching the juices, which would otherwise be lost on the plate.