There’s a certain Hollywood glamour attached to fried green tomatoes, thanks to the much-loved 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes. Based on Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, the film brought us the fictional Whistle Stop Café in Alabama, where friendship, storytelling and plates of golden, crispy tomatoes became part of the magic. It also helped turn this humble dish into an icon of Southern American cooking.
But here’s a little culinary surprise: fried green tomatoes may not have originated in the American South at all. Some of the earliest known recipes appeared in a Chicago newspaper in the nineteenth century, with the dish later cropping up in cookbooks from the American Midwest and Northeast. The theory is that cooks found a delicious use for tomatoes that refused to ripen before the autumn frosts arrived. Waste not, want not — a principle that would have been well understood in Kent and Sussex gardens, too.
The idea is wonderfully simple. Firm, unripe tomatoes are sliced, coated in a seasoned crumb or cornmeal mixture, then fried until the outside is crisp and golden while the tomato inside softens but retains its distinctive tang. The contrast between crunchy coating and sharp, juicy fruit is what makes the dish so appealing.
So if you, like me, have a few tomatoes that bloomed a little too late to ripen. Here’s a recipe for you. It’s easy. Give it a go and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. I can’t wait for next year’s crop to NOT ripen.
Ingredients:
Firm green tomatoes
Flour (any kind will do)
Eggs (2 should do it – beaten & seasoned)
Breadcrumbs
Optional: chopped chilli, chilli powder, parmesan mixed into the breadcrumbs
Method:
Heat olive oil in a sturdy frying pan over a medium/high heat
Chop the tomatoes into fairly thick slices
Coat in flour
Dip in beaten egg mixture
Coat in Breadcrumbs
Fry both sides in the hot oil over medium/high heat until the breadcrumbs brown.
Eat straight away while they’re hot and juicy.
