When the Spanish explorer Cortés returned to Europe with tomatoes, the New World nightshade created a scandal. A red ripe tomato reminded people so much of human flesh that eating one seemed improperly erotic. One solution was to eat the tomato when still green and therefore less fleshlike and not sweet. No one knows if that is how fried green tomatoes came to be, but Louis Van Dyke, the late proprietor of the Blue Willow Inn of Social Circle, Georgia, where fried green tomatoes are a signature, suspected they first were made by Italians who dredged tomato slices in semolina and deep-fried them, creating a versatile dish that is good companion to any meal or a fine snack with beer, lemonade, or ice tea.
Fried green tomatoes were an icon of the Southern kitchen for decades before Fannie Flagg’s best-selling 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and its subsequent film version made them known to Americans beyond the South. They continue as a symbol of homespun Southern cooking, though frequently now they are used as a down-home note in an upscale dish: a base for crab cakes, folded into a deluxe BLT, or a puckery layer in eggs Benedict.