Crispy chicken, biscuits, sweet tea, fried green tomatoes. These are some of America’s iconic Southern foods, the last of which can thank a movie, Fried Green Tomatoes, and the book it was based on, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, for its popularity. We’ve all seen fried green tomatoes on restaurant menus, and we may have even tried to cook the dish at home, but do we know how, exactly, it became a thing—and a Southern thing in particular?
The basic concept of the dish isn’t too hard to understand: Sometimes, all you’ve got in your garden are firm green tomatoes. What to do with flavorless, tough produce? Salt it, batter it, and sizzle it in oil, someone, at some point, thought. But who? Where?
According to Robert F. Moss, author of The Fried Green Tomato Swindle and Other Southern Culinary Adventures, fried green tomatoes first appear in 19th century Northeastern and Midwestern cookbooks such as the 1877 Buckeye Cookbook and the 1873 Presbyterian Cookbook, which was put out by the First Presbyterian Church of Dayton, OH. Recipes can also be found in Jewish cookbooks from the early 20th century: The 1919 International Jewish Cookbook by Florence Kreisler Greenbaum contained “1600 recipes according to the Jewish dietary laws with the rules for kashering,” from “America, Austria, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, Roumania, Etc., Etc.,” and was published in New York. The only Southern mention of the recipe that Moss could dig up was from a 1944 Alabama newspaper, which printed a recipe as part of an article mocking the USDA’s dietary recommendations during wartime.
The message is clear: fried tomatoes do not come from the South.
Now, the Whistle Stop Café in Fannie Flagg’s book was based on a real place, her aunt’s Irondale Café in Irondale, Alabama, where she did eat fried green tomatoes as a kid. But the staff there has admitted that it wasn’t a serious part of their menu before the movie came out, bringing hordes of people hungry for the dish.
So, sorry Southerners, you might have a culinary history jam-packed with interesting dishes, but fried green tomatoes are only “Southern” because a movie made them that way. If you’re curious how the North does the dish, here’s the recipe from the 1902 cookbook 365 Luncheon Dishes, published in Philadelphia.
Fried Green Tomatoes
Slice green tomatoes in thin slices, roll in flour. Heat and butter the griddle, fry the slices on it and when cooked sprinkle with powdered sugar. Serve with fish.