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Southern Tomato Pie
For one pie, peel and slice green tomatoes, add four table-spoons vinegar, one of butter, three of sugar; flavor with nutmeg or cinnamon; bake with two crusts slowly. This tastes very much like a green apple pie. - Mrs. Ceba Hull.
A mock apple pie built on unripe tomatoes, written in the compressed shorthand of a community cookbook. The proportions are workable but assume a smaller, shallower pie plate than most modern ones, and they assume the cook knows to deal with the juice.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoesGreen tomatoes are far wetter than apples and the recipe gives no thickener. Slice them thin, toss with the sugar, let them stand 20-30 minutes, and pour off the liquid before filling the shell, or the bottom crust will be soup. A tablespoon of flour or cornstarch scattered over the fruit is the usual insurance.
- "Bake slowly"Instructions of this kind generally point to what period cooks called a slow oven, usually reckoned somewhere in the region of 300-325F, though the term was never precise. Because the filling needs real time to soften the tomatoes, one modern approach -- a departure from the original direction -- is to start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 325F for another 40-50 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- How many tomatoesThe recipe never says. For a 9-inch pie plate, figure four to five medium green tomatoes, about 1 1/2 lb, peeled and sliced thin.
- Sugar and vinegarThree tablespoons of sugar is modest by modern standards; later versions of this pie often call for considerably more, in the range of 1/2 to 3/4 cup, and it is worth tasting as you go, since green tomatoes are tart but less acidic than a green cooking apple. The four tablespoons of vinegar supply the acid bite that makes the apple illusion work, so do not cut it entirely; cider vinegar is a reasonable choice here.
- PeelingGreen tomato skin is tough and stays tough through baking. A brief dip in boiling water does not slip it the way it does a ripe tomato; a swivel peeler or a sharp paring knife is faster.
- ButterOne tablespoon. The recipe does not say how it goes in; dotting it over the filling before the top crust is laid on is the usual handling.
- YieldOne 9-inch double-crust pie, six to eight servings. Best served just warm, when the filling has set enough to cut cleanly.
Green tomato pie belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century "mock" pastries, alongside mock apple pie made with crackers and vinegar, and vinegar pie made from pantry staples alone. The likely logic is seasonal rather than fanciful: at the end of the growing season a garden could be full of tomatoes that would never ripen before frost, and such fruit was commonly turned into pickle, chowchow, or pie. Sugar and an acid stand in for the missing apple, and the spicing, nutmeg or cinnamon, is what would have gone into a real apple pie. The Dixie Cook Book, like many regional compilations of its era, printed such recipes over the names of the women who contributed them, and the closing line, "This tastes very much like a green apple pie," reads as Mrs. Hull vouching for the substitution.