Ever since the movie Fried Green Tomatoes came out, the green tomato has been clawing its way into semi-mainstream cuisine. It’s actually a cultural rediscovery, since people have been eating green tomatoes for centuries. My recipes for green tomato pickle and green tomato mincemeat are a couple of hundred years old. I have a friend who each year makes a version of chow chow pickle with chopped green tomato, cauliflower, corn, onions, and gherkins that’s delicious with a plain pan-fried pork chop or slice of ham. You can also use green tomatoes as a substitute for tomatillos for fresh salsa verde and you don’t have to get them out of that little paper husk or roast them first.
Why not let them ripen on the vine until hard frost takes the lot? Or yank up the plants and hang them upside down in the garage for the last ones to ripen, or even pull the green tomatoes off and one by one wrap them lovingly in newspaper until they ripen in the kitchen? (You’ve got to be kidding!) The main reason is because at the end of summer, when the days start to shorten and the nights grow cooler, the tomatoes that remain on the vine are just ain’t the same veg (fruit, whatever) as those luscious things you sliced onto your sandwich in July and August.
“We have less sunlight, the temperatures are changing, and the plants are playing out,” explains Jon Traunfeld, Director of University of Maryland’s Master Gardener program and an experienced fruit and vegetable grower himself. “The color won’t be the same, and the flavor will decrease.”
Most of us are on tomato overload so this fading of ripe-tomato flavor is not the loss it would be in the middle of summer. Coupled with our current self-conscious frugality, we’re more willing to consider the possibilities that the green ones hold instead of letting them go to waste or pitching them into the compost. It’s a little like having one plant that produces two different vegetables. Plus, fresh green tomatoes are surprisingly versatile.
“I like to make Earl’s Hot Stuff,” says Traunfeld. “I call it that because a guy named Earl taught me to make it. Chop green tomatoes, onions and cayenne peppers and pack them into jars, pour boiling vinegar and water solution over it and water-bath ‘em [for ten minutes]. I have with it cheese and crackers all winter.”
There are plenty of recipes for fried green tomatoes in really old cookbooks and on the web. Most are just a cornmeal-dusted or cornmeal-battered thing fried in either oil or butter with a little salt and pepper. They make a very nice side with meat or fish of almost any kind. (Fried may not be good for you but is sure tastes good.). But our very favorite fall green tomato recipe is adapted from Maryland’s Way cookbook, a kind of fried green tomato casserole, and is superb with my husband’s roast wild goose. A friend who doesn’t even like tomatoes or vegetables in general and won’t eat wild goose AT ALL still comes to dinner when we have goose and green tomato casserole because she LOVES this dish.
Slice firm green tomatoes about ½ inch thick, dip in flour, salt and pepper on one side and fry until browned in butter or oil or a combo of the two. Layer in a casserole dish, uncooked side down, sprinkle brown sugar liberally on each layer and repeat until you have three or four layers. Cover and bake at 350F for about 35 minutes or until they are soft and bubbly. Tart-sweet and delicious with any roast fowl.
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