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Fried Tomatoes
4 medium sized tomatoes Fine dry bread crumbs Mazola 1 egg 1/4 cup milk Wash and dry the tomatoes and slice crosswise to make three thick pieces. Dust with salt, pepper and a little sugar and roll in fine dry crumbs. Beat the egg, add the milk, dip the slices in this, dip again in crumbs and fry in deep Mazola, hot enough to brown a bit of bread in one minute, 350 degrees F.. Drain the tomatoes on crumpled paper and serve plain, or on toast with white sauce.
A straightforward breaded-and-fried tomato from a corn-oil promotional cookbook. Two things decide the outcome: the firmness of the tomato and the dryness of the crumb coat.
- MazolaMazola is corn oil, still sold under that name. Any neutral oil with a smoke point above 400F works identically here; the recipe appears in a booklet published to sell it.
- Tomatoes to useFour medium tomatoes cut crosswise into three thick slices each gives twelve slices; the recipe states no yield, but that would serve about four. Choose firm, underripe fruit — fully ripe summer tomatoes shed water into the coating and it slides off in the fat.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe double coating is the point of the method. Let the breaded slices rest on a rack for ten minutes before frying so the egg sets against the crumbs and the crust holds.
- TemperatureThe bread-cube test and 350F agree, and 350F is right for deep frying breaded vegetables. Fry in small batches; a crowded pot drops the oil temperature and the crumbs absorb rather than seal.
- "Deep Mazola"Deep-fry means enough oil to float the slices, roughly two inches in a heavy pot. Shallow pan-frying in a quarter inch also works but you must turn the slices and the edges brown unevenly.
- TimingThe original gives none. Two to three minutes total is enough — you want the crumbs browned while the tomato is still holding its shape. Longer and the slice collapses into the crust.
- Draining"Crumpled paper" would most likely have meant newsprint or brown paper; use paper towels or, better, a wire rack, which keeps the underside from steaming.
- ServingThe white sauce option is a plain flour-and-milk béchamel, about a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned with salt and pepper.
This comes from one of the many single-product cookbooks American food manufacturers issued in the first decades of the twentieth century — Mazola corn oil was introduced by Corn Products Refining Company in 1911, and booklets like this one existed to teach cooks that a vegetable oil could stand in for lard and butter in frying, baking and salad dressings. Fried tomatoes belong to a long American breakfast tradition of putting a vegetable through the skillet alongside or in place of meat; the familiar version uses green tomatoes, whose firmness suits the pan, and the recipe here also calls for a dusting of sugar. Serving fried slices on toast under white sauce is one of the ways such a small amount of food could be turned into a plated breakfast dish, though how common the practice was is hard to say.