Fried Green Tomatoes
Circa: 1900's
I couldn’t imagine starting my weekly recipe series with anything other than
Fried Green Tomatoes! I love the delicious combination of the slightly tart warm
tomatoes with a crunchy cornmeal coating.
If you are like me you were probably first introduced to fried green
tomatoes by the 1992 film based on Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Is there anything
more classic and southern than this dish?
Well the truth might surprise you.
As
a history lover I was interested in the origins of the dish and set out to do a
little research of my own. I began with Miss Flagg herself and the
cookbook The Original Whistlestop Café Cookbook
in which she reveals that:
“The
Irondale Café was started by my great aunt Bess in the thirties… just outside my hometown of Birmingham. Virginia Johnson, that fabulous cook who first went
to work for my aunt when she was eleven can still be found in the kitchen
happily frying up a fresh batch of fried green tomatoes every day, the same
kind that I, along with generations of others have enjoyed since we were
children.”
While
Fannie Flagg reminisces about enjoying fried tomatoes as a child, it was hard
to find further evidence that this was a traditional southern dish. Actually,
most of the sources that I found attributes the dishes’ origins to Jewish
Immigrants in the Northeast and Midwest at the turn of the century. Robert F.
Moss, a food historian and writer found recipes for the Fried Green Tomatoes in
the 1919 International Jewish Cookbook
as well as newspapers and magazines by the early part of the 20th
century. He found nothing in southern cookbooks and very little in the newspapers.
While
the origins of Fried Green Tomatoes in the south is unclear, in recent years I think that it is safe to
say it is a southern staple! I hope you enjoy!!
Recipe: Diana Swenson-Siegel www.allrecipes.com
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