August 6, 2010
The Surprising Origins of Fried Green Tomatoes
Fried green tomatoes, courtesy of Flickr user Old Shoe Woman
The first time I, like a lot of Americans, heard of fried green tomatoes was when a movie by that name came out in 1991. Based on a novel by Fannie Flagg called Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, it starred Mary Louise Parker, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy in a feel-good story of female friendship and empowerment set in Alabama. I was not a fan of the movie (two of the main characters are named Idgie and Ninny—need I say more?), and I didn’t give much thought to the ostensibly Southern dish (more about that later) that one of the characters craves until a friend and I visited my aunt and uncle in New Orleans in the late 1990s.
They took us to a neighborhood hole-in-the-wall that served simple Southern fare. The whole meal was delicious, as I recall, though the only dish I can remember clearly was the fried green tomatoes. Now, I know that most things that taste good taste even better when battered and deep-fried. But something about this dish was extraordinary—the combination of firm-fleshed tomato with crunchy cornmeal coating, the slight tartness of the unripe fruit balancing the oiliness of the exterior. I was smitten.
The New Orleans visit was our first stop on a road trip to Chicago. (Now, why didn’t I remember this story for Inviting Writing, instead of my sad tale of food-borne illness?) I kept looking for fried green tomatoes everywhere we went. Although I ate lots of other good things on that trip, I found my new favorite food only once more, at an upscale restaurant in Memphis. They were a disappointment—over-seasoned and overcooked.
The next time I encountered fried green tomatoes was almost a decade later at a rural county fair in, of all places, upstate New York. Served at a corn farmer’s food stand, they were not what I had come to believe was traditional Southern-style—they were more like a corn fritter with a slice of green tomato nestled inside—but I was enraptured once again.
The reason I say “ostensibly Southern” is that, it turns out, fried green tomatoes may have been as unusual in the South before 1991 as they were everywhere else. In fact, according to Robert F. Moss, a food historian and writer in South Carolina, “they entered the American culinary scene in the Northeast and Midwest, perhaps with a link to Jewish immigrants, and from there moved onto the menu of the home-economics school of cooking teachers who flourished in the United States in the early-to-mid 20th century.”
Jewish?! And here I thought the crowning culinary achievements of my ethnic heritage were matzo ball soup and bagels. Moss found recipes in several Jewish and Midwestern cookbooks of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, but none in Southern cookbooks and hardly any in Southern newspapers. You can read the whole entertaining and informative account of how a movie changed (or distorted) culinary history at his blog.
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that fried green tomatoes should be a Northern dish. Moss confesses to not liking green tomatoes, arguing that the ripe ones are “one of nature’s true delights” and that it’s a shame to eat them any other way. I am also a huge fan of really good ripe tomatoes, and if forced to choose only one or the other for the rest of my life I would have to go with ripe ones. But where I live in the Northeast, the growing season is so short that gardeners have to find something to do with all their unripe tomatoes before the first frost. Frying ‘em up in batter seems like a good solution.
Although we’re at the peak of tomato season now, last week at the farmers’ market I spotted some green tomatoes next to the ripe ones. I bought some of each, and fried up the green ones according to a recipe from Southern Living magazine. That was before I read Moss’s blog, though; maybe next time I’ll try to track down one of the Jewish recipes he mentions.
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I would suspect the Meso-Americans pre-dated any Anglo or Afo-Americans cooking tomatoes this way.
Our family has hand written recipes for this and other tomato uses from ~1890.
I grew up in Knoxville, TN eating fried green tomatoes and I’m almost 60 years old. My mother grew up in Birmingham, AL eating them.
I never had them until I moved to MS in early 2003. They are delightful and much better than boiled peanuts (which are also green and unripe but no doubt “southern”).
I also grew up in Tennessee eating fried green tomatoes, since the 1950′s. My grandmother cooked them before that. So they seem to be in all sections of the country, maybe just not in cookbooks and restaurants.
Greetings!
I came up with a similiar article last month at Tie Dye Travels, referenced here on Eat Arkansas, the Arkansas Times’ food blog:
http://www.arktimes.com/EatArkansas/archives/2010/07/06/southern-staple/
Please feel welcome to try my version of the recipe.
Cheers!
Kat
I’ve had fried green tomatoes all my life and I’m from Arkansas. We had them while waiting on the rest to ripe in the spring.
I have been eating fried green tomatoes all my life,50+ years. It all started in Ohio with my great grandmother, who had been eating and cooking them her whole life which started in 1895. But the recipe is a little different than the standard I see every where.
My mother fried green tomatoes as far back as I can remember, and I was born in 1925 (Los Angeles). Mother was born and raised in Kansas, and her parents came from that area, also. There was no southern history in our family! Could it be that Grandma, or Mother, just had some green tomatoes and tried frying some? All we did was dip them in flour and fry them, salting them as we started. I still love them.
My family has cooked fried green tomatoes for 4 or 5 generations, going back at least to my great great grandmother, who was of Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish descent, lived from the mid-nineteenth century until about 1920, and who lived her whole life in northeastern Ohio. Until the book (and then movie) came out when I was in my 20′s I had always figured they were only a Pennsylvania Dutch/Amish thing. We made similar to the way you describe your New Orleans ones, I have never seen them as fritters (although we ate a lot of apple fritters) even though my grandfather is from Upstate New York. We used to have a hard time getting any ripe tomatoes because my mom and aunt were always stealing the green ones. Some days the stove would never get turned off, they just kept running outside for another tomato to slice, bread, fry, eat, run out for another round of tomatoes, repeat!
My Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother (born ca. 1880) prepared her family’s “receipt” for fried green tomatoes in east-central Indiana. She used a cast iron skillet and bacon fat. My mother employed her mother’s technique, dredging the thinly sliced, very green tomatoes in well peppered flour, and fried them in butter ’til deeply browned. Although we’d appropriate a suitably green tomato from my dad’s prized plants occasionally, the true feast came at the end of the season, when frost threatened. Impossible to describe my Mom’s heavenly corn fritters, but they were a more elaborate batter preparation.
My mother, who grew up in Middletown, New York, during the Depression, often made fried green tomatoes for us when I was growing up in Martinsville, Virginia. She said her mother used to make them and had to sneak the green tomatoes in from the garden because my grandfather didn’t want them picked before they were ripe. Of course, they were originally a fall dish made when all of the tomatoes, ripe or green, were picked just before the first frost. So in our family anyway, the dish was carried from the Northeast to the South. She did not use a heavy batter, just a light coating of some sort, and pan-fried them.
i was born in northern Maine in 1929. Our family always had fried green tomatoes but my mother dipped them in flour with a little salt frying them in lard. When I had learned about the corn meal version, I tried it and liked it better. Now that I live in Florida, I have access to them almost all year. Would you believe I have one in my refrigerator now for me to use tomorrow? My son in California wants me to bring a few out to him.
[...] Conheça a origem dos tomates verdes fritos (o prato, não o filme) e veja a receita aqui – nham! (via @ivanisegomes, RT de @ZagatBuzz) (foto: Old Shoe Woman, no Flickr) [...]
They are mentioned in a number of southern cookbooks from before the movie. I’ve responded to the post here. Interesting topic.
[...] dishes, their “Fried Green Tomatoes.” These were absolutely incredible too. Like this blog on Smithsonian Magazine, I concur that I too did not hear of these green marvels until the 1991 film came out. Tomatoes? [...]
I grew up in Tennessee, Arkansas, & Virginia, avoiding the ubiquitous fried green tomatoes that were offered at most big family meals, and have been cooked & eaten by both sides of my family (southern, eastern & mid-west) for generations. I have not tried them in over 30 years, & found enough in area farmers markets to make a large batch of piccallili; so, I’ve decided to put away my childhood prejudice & find a recipe so I can try them myself.
Assuming that the movie introduced them in the south is silly, although the movie certainly popularized them in restaurants. Fried green tomatoes are, and always have been, the frugal cooks’ way of using everything that comes out of the garden, as is green tomato piccallili (also known as chow-chow or relish, depending on region).
We of the midwest (Owensboro, Ky) have been eating fried green tomatoes for a long long time. When I was young in the early 1940′s they were staples from early summer thru Christmas. Green tomatoes were harvested before frost wrapped in newspaper and stored in a cool dry place and selected up to and sometimes into January. I remember my paternal grand mother bragging that her recipe was given to her by her mother and it contained a secret. (some red pepper flake was added to a mix of 1/2 flour and 1/2 white cornmeal) I am deep in my 70′s and still love to cook and teach my grandchildren and great grand children to cook. Poppy like his grandmother passes recipes on….