Annie's New York Kitchen

And yet, I am a dedicated tomato gardener. Determined to beat last year’s blight, I had started twelve different tomato plants, some from The Phantom Gardener in Rhinebeck and some from Monkshood Nursery. All twelve plants had bloomed into adulthood (that is, they’ve all had green fruit since the middle of June) and it seemed time for me to prune the plants a little. I wanted these plants to live and bear fruit through September, and that meant I had to lighten the vines and let the ripening sunshine get to the larger fruit.

I still didn’t think the greenies would be edible, but a recent dinner at Tipsy Parson, a homey kind-of-southern restaurant on Eighth Avenue in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, included shrimp grits, a famous Southern dish in which delicately-seasoned and grilled shrimp are placed on top of seasoned grits, a kind of soupy version of polenta, and generally a good deal of cheese is involved as well. In the Parson’s rendition, the whole is crowned by a delicious, golden-brown, breaded disk that turns out to be nothing but a fried green tomato.

And the thing is, although I am no more Southern than it takes to be from the South Shore of Long Island, this tomato had me whistling Dixie!

The green tomato, after its gentle cooking, is creamy and sweetly vegetal, not like an unripe thing at all. You might think this was a whole new vegetable created specifically for this use—and a vegetable worth frying for, being not as watery as a zucchini nor as bland and wet as a mushroom.

As soon as I was back in my garden, I harvested the largest green tomatoes available (and incidentally this did lead to the sun being able to reach and redden the other large ‘maters, just as people had said).

First I tried a very simple recipe taken from Saveur magazine, which had taken it from a St. Louis magazine called Sauce. Basically all I did was buy some cornmeal at Adams Fairacre Farms, which always has things like this, and pour a cup of it into a sealable plastic bag along with a few things like salt and red pepper flakes. The recipe said that I didn’t have to use bacon grease if I didn’t feel “sassy” enough to use it, which got me mad because I generally consider that I am sassy enough for all normal purposes, so I bought a package of bacon ends (again, this is the sort of thing in which Addams excels), rendered out the fat, skimmed off the solids, shook my tomatoes (you should pardon the expression) in the cornmeal and dealt out a handful in the foaming pan of pig fat.

Were they good?

No, not really. The cornmeal slid off immediately and soaked up the grease. The ‘maters were naked and greasy. And I was NOT sassy enough to eat the fried meal out of the pan. In fact, just looking at it practically gave me pellagra.

The thing is, I’m going to fry, fry agin. Now that I know what fried green tomatoes are supposed to taste like, I have a goal in mind. And yes, I am insufficiently sassy to use pure bacon fat, but I might cut a cup of canola oil with a tablespoon of pig drippins, mightn’t I? Cook’s Magazine has a recipe in which the tomatoes spend a little time in a buttermilk wash. This could help the corn meal and flour stick (I do think I need flour too), and even give the creamy fried veg a little backbone.

And maybe a spicy yogurt dip.

Sassy enough for y’all?

Since the tomatoes were such a mess, I didn't take pictures. Instead, please enjoy this lovely Prime steak from Fleischer's in Kingston.

Annie Newman is a writer and nonprofessional cook who lives in Kingston and travels all over the place, eating as she goes.