Home › Meat Substitutes › Tomatoes in Batter
Tomatoes in Batter
Sprinkle slices of tomato with salt and pepper, cover well with batter, and fry in butter until evenly browned on both sides.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already keep a fritter batter in your head. The whole success of it rests on getting the tomato dry enough for the batter to cling.
- The batter is not specifiedThe reader is left to supply one. A plain frying batter along the lines of 1 cup flour, 1 egg, about 3/4 cup milk and 1/2 teaspoon salt, beaten smooth to the thickness of heavy cream, will serve. Anything thinner slides off the wet fruit.
- Salt first, then waitSalting draws water out of tomato, which is the enemy here. Sprinkle the slices, let them sit five minutes on a rack or paper, then blot both faces before battering.
- Cut thickSlices of about 1/2 inch hold their shape; thin ones collapse into the crust. Firm, slightly underripe tomatoes, or green ones, behave far better than a dead-ripe summer tomato.
- Flour before batterA light dusting of flour on the blotted slices gives the batter something to grip. The original's "cover well" is doing a lot of work in a short sentence.
- Butter alone will scorchButter can scorch -- whole butter browns quickly at the heat needed to set a batter, so it wants watching. Clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, is more forgiving; the batter should sizzle on contact but the fat should not smoke.
- TimingTwo to three minutes a side is enough. The tomato only needs to soften; the crust dictates when it comes out. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- Yield and servingOne large tomato gives three or four slices, so allow one per person as a side dish and two as the centre of a light supper. Good with a cream gravy or simply more black pepper.
Battered and fried tomatoes belong to an older domestic habit: dipping a vegetable in batter and browning it in fat was the standard way of turning something cheap and watery into something that ate like a cutlet, and fried tomatoes, usually green ones, appear in American cookery well before the First World War. Such recipes also sit near a genre of cookbook that flourished in the 1910s, when American and British households were pressed to conserve meat for the war effort and "meatless" days became a matter of patriotic housekeeping as much as economy or vegetarian conviction — though that context is not itself evidence of where this particular recipe came from.