Home › Meat Substitutes › Fried Tomatoes
Fried Tomatoes
Cut the tomatoes in half-inch slices, put them in a frying pan, and fry until brown in butter or oil. Place on a warm dish, and in the same pan in which the tomatoes were cooked, make a sauce of one tablespoon of flour, salt, pepper and enough milk to make the dressing the consistency of thick cream. Cook the sauce until the raw taste of the flour is gone, and pour over the tomatoes.
A plain pan-fry finished with a milk gravy built in the same skillet. The recipe assumes more of the cook than it states, so a few points are worth fixing before you start.
- Which tomatoesThe original doesn't say, and it matters. Firm green or barely-blushing tomatoes hold their shape and brown; dead-ripe slices collapse into the pan and weep water. If you only have ripe fruit, choose the firmest and salt the slices for ten minutes, then blot dry.
- Half-inch slicesThinner slices disintegrate before they colour. Cut across the equator, not through the stem end, so each round holds together.
- Fat in the pan"Butter or oil" without a quantity means enough to film the pan generously, roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons for a skillet's worth. Butter alone will brown and burn at the heat needed here; butter cut with a neutral oil is steadier.
- The sauce ratioOne tablespoon of flour will thicken about three-quarters of a cup of milk to the stated consistency of thick cream. Add the milk gradually to the flour and pan fat, off the heat, before returning it to the burner.
- Cooking out the flourThis is the hinge. Two to three minutes of steady simmering after the sauce thickens is the minimum; a pasty, chalky gravy is the usual failure of this dish. The browned tomato residue left in the pan is the whole point of making the sauce there.
- Fat for the rouxIf you fried in oil and the pan is nearly dry, leave about a tablespoon of fat behind before adding the flour. Too little and the flour scorches; too much and the sauce breaks.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity of tomatoes. The sauce as written is modest: figure on three or four medium tomatoes if you want the amounts to match, which would serve two or three as a course, four as a side.
Fried tomatoes appear in American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, sometimes in this unbreaded form — sliced, browned in fat, and served under a milk gravy made in the pan, the same treatment given to fried apples and fried salt pork; other period recipes dredge or crumb the slices first. The crumb- or cornmeal-crusted version now widely known as "fried green tomatoes" is usually thought of as Southern, though that association appears to be largely a twentieth-century development. Some meatless cookery of this period was prompted by wartime and economic pressure on the meat supply rather than by ethical vegetarianism, and the working principle in such books was to keep the shape of the meal intact while swapping out its centre. A browned, sliced thing under a cream gravy occupies the plate exactly where a chop would, which is why the gravy is not optional decoration but the argument of the recipe.