Tomato Pie
While southerners were the first North Americans to embrace the tomato as a culinary ingredient--baking it in casseroles, frying it, preserving it in sugar, pureeing it into soups, and rendering it into sauce by 1810—they were not the first to make tomato pies. All the earliest pie notices date from the 1830s. All come from New England. A widely republished article from the Springfield MA Republican in 1838 announced that tomato pie (a sugared version) was the equal of elderberry or gooseberry.
The appearance of the first pies coincided with the sea change of opinion about tomatoes in the broader nation; from indifference and suspicion to a conviction that they were a medical boon. Andrew F. Smith chronicled the tomato craze of the 1830s in his entertaining book, The Tomato in America.
All of the early pies were double crust, but there were decided schools of approach—green tomato pies with sugar & spice and sometimes vinegar, ripe tomato pies (featuring yellow or light colored tomatoes) that could either be sugared, or salted, buttered, and spiced, and there were a lost tradition of tomato custard pies. Often these mixed eggs with the tomato syrup used in making preserved “tomato figs.”
In the 1870s the single crust flipped pie came into being. [See article below] Here we see a step toward the type of open faced pie that now predominates in the South. The pie is baked with sliced sugared ripe tomatoes in a dish and a crust on top; once baked the pie is flipped to expose the tomato filling, glazed with egg and popped into the over for finishing.
How does this open faced pie differ from those now popular in the South? I’ve sampled numbers of the prevailing sort—that of the Tomato Shed outside of Charleston exemplifies the 21st century pie. It has red tomatoes rather than the old yellow. It is salted rather than sugared. The baked tomato face is covered with a mixture of cheddar cheese and Duke’s Mayonnaise. The spicing (cinnamon, mace) has been dialed back and salt and pepper and herbs pushed to the fore.
Sugared green tomato pies still exist—I’ve tasted excellent ones in Kentucky and western Virginia. But I haven’t encountered a double crust savory tomato pie in some years, so welcome notices of places that serve such a thing.
I’ve cooked the earliest bake tomato dishes—Martha Randolph’s scalloped tomatoes and Sarah Rutledge’s shrimp and tomato bake. I thought the former needed a dash of Worcestershire sauce or something. The latter saw the shrimps shrink and toughen in the baking. So I think I’ll take a wedge of pie.