ISSUE 72, UNEXPECTED ORIGINS, Part 1: The Midwestern Origin of Fried Green Tomatoes

The Midwestern Origin of Fried Green Tomatoes

“Truth of the matter is, you can get green tomatoes any time from June through October. That’s the reason it became a standard side in southern meat & three restaurants.”

That may be true, but the plush allure of a fully ripe tomato, particularly a Cherokee Purple or an Old German Yellow, is so great that no tomato lover in their right minds would be plucking big green fruit off their heirloom vines. That’s why when the first mentions of fried green tomatoes took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in the South, they appeared in the October issues of newspapers. Issues that appeared at that time when tomato vines ceased ripening and remained burdened with green “fruit” that would never color. Consider this recipe from the October 4, 1903 issue of the Atanta Journal:

Fried Green Tomatoes

Wash six large tomatoes and cut into slices one-half inch long.  Beat the yolk of one egg with a tablespoonful of cold water.  Sprinkle over the tomatoes a little salt and pepper, dip each slice into the beaten egg and then into fine bread crumbs.  Fry a nice brown on both sides in butter and serve on a hot dish with the following sauce: Cream together two tablespoonfuls of butter with one of flour, and when thoroughly blended brown in the frypan; add to this one cup of scalded milk, stirring constantly until it thicken; cook for three minutes, add one tablespoonful of salt and pour round the tomatoes which have been nicely arranged on a chop platter. [1]

The fried green tomato was a new notion for southerners at the turn of the twentieth century. For decades—indeed since the 1830s—southerners knew exactly what to do with green tomatoes—slice them and pickle them. Green Tomato Pickle, Green Tomato Catsup, Green Tomato and Apple Mince Pie, even Green Tomato Sauce can be found in the manuscript recipe collections of numbers of southern cooks. So it just didn’t occur to southerners to bread them and fry them until they caught wind of a breakfast concoction that had caught on in the upper midwest in the late 1870s.

Iowa seems to have been the hot bed of creativity. The first printed recipe appeared in the Toledo Iowa Chronicle on October 12, 1876:

The sugar sprinkle was noteworthy, and was somewhat characteristic of German-American treatments of tomatoes in the mid-19th century. The audience for this recipe was decidedly local. Mrs. S. J. W. Adair of Iowa sought wide notice for this gustatory invention of Iowa, forwarding a recipe to “The Home” section of the Chicago Inter-Ocean in September 1877. “I must give a few recipes I have tried and found excellent. One is fried green tomatoes. Cut a thin slice from top and bottom, and throw them away; then cut the remainder in slices, roll in flour, sprinkle with pepper and salt, and fry brown in butter. These are delicious for breakfast” (September 29, 1877), 12. No sugar in this version. During that same week another, different recipe appeared in the Mantiwoc Wisconsin Pilot. The writer indicated the slices after being seasoning should be laid in egg wash and then rolled in cracker crumbs before frying. The recipe indicated that this method was preferable to doing without the egg and coating the slices in flour before frying in butter. (September 20, 1877), 5. 1877 was clearly the year that the dish came to public consciousness.

Is it surprising that a region with a much shorter growing season than places further South, and hence a more substantial crop of tomatoes that never manage to ripen, would advance the gustatory horizons of green tomato cookery.

In 1878 the fried green tomato impinged on southern consciousness in those regions closest to the midwest. On October 4, 1878 the Cincinnati Daily Star published a recipe submitted by “A” from McMinnville, Tennessee. It counseled an eggless flour coating, but suggesting deep frying in fat rather than a butter fry. An 1883 recipe published in Staunton Virginia neglects to coat the tomato slices in either flour or bread crumbs. A defective recipe. Recognizable recipes would not appear in southern print until the later 1890s. The interest in the dish appears to have resulted from its recategorization as a relish, indeed an ideal accomopaniment to steak, rather than a breakfast food.

After 1900 southerners adopted it as their own. Cornmeal coated the slices as often as flour. Its nativity in Iowa was, somehow, forgotten.