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Fried Tomatoes
Cut a large Feejee tomato in half, flour the cut side, heat very hot, and put the floured side down; when brown on one side, turn; when done, pour over a teacup of hot cream or rich milk.
Three lines and no seasoning, no fat and no pan named — this is shorthand written for a cook who already knew the dish. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The hinge: a dry, screaming-hot panThe hinge: a screaming-hot pan -- "heat very hot" is the whole technique. Flour on a wet tomato slice in a lukewarm pan slides off into paste; a heavy cast-iron skillet over medium-high, with the floured face pressed down and left alone for three or four minutes, gives the crust the recipe assumes.
- Fat is implied, not statedThe recipe names no fat, and frying of this kind was commonly done in butter or bacon drippings. Use a tablespoon or two of either — enough to film the pan, not to fry in.
- A Feejee tomatoThe Fejee (a related strain was sold as Fejee Improved) was a large pinkish market variety of the mid-1800s. Any big beefsteak stands in for it: cut into halves or thick slabs, at least half an inch, or they collapse.
- Ripe or greenThe recipe does not say which; a ripe tomato, halved, is the likelier reading. The greener the tomato, the firmer and more acid the result — both were fried in this period, and green ones will take a minute or two longer per side.
- A teacup of creamRoughly six ounces, or three-quarters of a cup, on the usual reckoning. The original has hot cream poured over the finished tomatoes; letting it bubble and thicken briefly in the pan with the browned flour first, then spooning it over, makes it come together instead of separating.
- Season it yourselfThe original names nothing. Salt and pepper the cut faces before flouring, and salt the cream at the end; unseasoned, the dish tastes flat and watery.
- YieldAs written, one large tomato halved with a teacup of cream: one or two servings. Cook in a single layer with space between the pieces or they steam.
Fried tomatoes belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, by which time the tomato had become a staple of American summer cooking. The Home Cook Book — a collection of contributed receipts first published in Chicago in 1874 and reissued in a Toronto edition later in the decade — treats it as an everyday breakfast or supper vegetable, and the naming of a specific variety — the Feejee, one of the large market tomatoes of the 1850s and 60s, whose name appears to have been borrowed from Fiji — is a reminder that home cooks then bought and grew named cultivars as a matter of course, in a way supermarket shopping has largely erased. The finish of hot cream is the same instinct behind cream gravy for chicken or salt pork: the browned flour left in the skillet was never wasted.