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Fried Tomatoes
3 large tomatoes Salt and pepper Flour Butter 1 cup cream sauce Wash the tomatoes; slice them in half-inch slices; sprinkle with salt, pepper and flour and brown lightly in butter. Lay on a hot platter and pour over them a cream sauce made with the butter that remains in the pan.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to make a pan sauce. The one line that matters is the last: the browned butter and tomato fond left in the skillet is the sauce base, so do not wipe the pan.
- Tomato choiceHalf-inch slices of a dead-ripe tomato will collapse into the flour and steam rather than brown. Use firm, barely ripe fruit, or green tomatoes, and blot the cut faces dry before seasoning.
- The flour coat"Sprinkle with flour" means a light dredge, not a batter; shake off the excess. Season and flour immediately before the slices go into the pan, since salt draws out moisture within a minute or two and loosens the coating.
- Heat and fatButter alone over the high heat needed for browning will darken fast. Medium-high heat, a generous knob, and about two to three minutes a side is enough; add fresh butter between batches rather than cooking all the slices at once in a crowded pan.
- Cream sauce, unspecifiedThe recipe assumes a sauce the reader already knows; the standard white sauce of the period runs to roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked out and seasoned. The text directs you to build it in the used skillet with the butter that remains, so the browned bits dissolve into it.
- "1 cup cream sauce"That is a fairly heavy pour over three tomatoes' worth of slices. Half a cup, thinned to a nappe consistency, coats without burying the crust you just built.
- The stray rice lineThe "1/2 cup rice" at the end reads as the start of another entry's ingredient list rather than part of this one; nothing in the method uses rice. Ignore it.
- YieldThree large tomatoes make enough slices to serve two as a light supper dish or four as a side. Serve at once, on a warmed platter as directed, since the coating softens quickly under sauce.
Fried tomatoes appear as a routine American vegetable dish in cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and books of Mrs. Fryer's generation treat them as unremarkable rather than regional: slice, season, flour, fry in butter, sauce. The cream sauce finish is characteristic of turn-of-the-century domestic-science cooking, in which a basic white sauce was taught first and then applied to a range of vegetables. A tomato firm enough to hold a half-inch slice is often one that has not fully ripened, and frying is one use for fruit that would not be served raw. Loose-leaf cookbooks were sold as pages to be filed in a binder so a housekeeper could add her own recipes alongside the printed ones.