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Fried Tomatoes
Hard, ripe tomatoes, fine bread crumbs, salt, pepper and butter; cut the tomatoes in slices half an inch thick, without peeling, mix salt and pepper with the crumbs, dip each piece of tomato in the crumbs, fry in the butter, which has been heated in a saucepan, and serve hot.
A plain skillet dish with two variables that decide whether it works: the firmness of the tomatoes and the temperature of the butter.
- "Hard, ripe" is the hingeChoose tomatoes that are fully coloured but still firm enough to resist a thumb, or slices will collapse into sauce in the pan. Firm under-ripe green tomatoes can be fried the same way, though this recipe calls for ripe ones.
- Salt the slices firstLay the cut rounds on a rack or paper for 10-15 minutes with a little salt, then blot. Tomatoes are mostly water, and drawing some of it off is what lets the crumb coating brown rather than steam.
- "Fine bread crumbs"This means dried crumbs from stale bread put through a sieve, not the coarse panko now sold as breadcrumbs. Dry fine crumbs adhere to a damp tomato slice without any egg wash; panko will mostly fall off.
- Butter alone will burnWhole butter at frying heat browns and then blackens before a thick tomato slice is done. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds the temperature; keep it at a steady medium so the crumbs colour in three or four minutes a side.
- "Saucepan"Period usage was looser than ours, and here the word need imply no more than the pan in which the butter is heated. A wide, heavy skillet is better, since the slices need room and should not touch.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. Reckon on one medium tomato per person, about half a cup of crumbs and two to three tablespoons of butter for four servings, frying in batches.
- ServingThey soften as they sit, so send them out directly from the pan. Some period recipes finish fried tomatoes by pouring a little cream or milk into the hot pan afterward, scraping up the browned crumbs and spooning that over; this one does not.
Fried tomatoes appear in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century, by which time the tomato was well established in the kitchen garden. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in 1911 as part of a broad line of household guides aimed at the same middle-class readership, and its vegetable chapter is brief and economical: a list of ingredients, a sentence of method, no measurements. Recipes like this one suited the late-summer glut, when a household with a garden had more ripe tomatoes than it could eat raw or put up, and the instruction not to peel is worth noting, since a good deal of tomato cookery of the period began with scalding and skinning.