Green Tomatoes
What’s Cooking is a series in which I answer questions and share advice about food and cooking that you have but may be too shy to ask.
Tomato season has started early. Last week while shopping at the market, I filled a plastic bag with only green tomatoes. A woman standing next to me picking out some beautiful, bright red, ripe, tomatoes asked me why I was only taking green tomatoes. She wanted to know if I was going to leave them to ripen. I smiled and told her, no, I was going to make some condiments with them.
How many of you buy green tomatoes? What do you do with them?
Each year, when tomatoes are in season, I buy green tomatoes to make Achar to replenish my stock. And in keeping with eating seasonal, during that period of time, I make and eat a lot of Green Tomato Choka, Salsa Verde and a fry-up/sauté. Last year I treated the green tomatoes just as we would slice cucumbers by the seasoning the sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper along with a squirt of fresh lime juice - makes a delicious quick pickle that can be used for burgers or sandwiches.
Remember that 1991 movie with Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy - Fried Green Tomatoes - set in the Southern United States? Talk about the influence of popular culture: because of the movie many people think that the dish - fried green tomatoes - originated in the South but it didn’t. In the movie it is mentioned and served in an eatery called the Whistle Stop Café. Though the café was based on a real place in the south - Irondale Café in Alabama, it is only after the movie came out that people would flock to restaurants in the south hungry for fried green tomatoes. According to food historian and a writer in South Carolina, Robert F Moss, fried green tomatoes “entered the American culinary scene in the Northeast and Midwest, perhaps with a link to Jewish immigrants.” See how food travels? Anyway, I mention all of that to say that the first time I had and cooked green tomatoes was because of the movie. The idea sounded appealing. I