The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern_ Knockout Dishes With Down-Home Flavor - Matt Lee [19]
GREEN TOMATO AND ONION PICKLES
makes 1 quart • TIME: 10 minutes preparation, 30 minutes cooling, 1 hour refrigeration
Green tomatoes practically pickle themselves, they’re so crisp and tart. We add a little ginger to ours, and the vinegary brine brings out their strange savory character. These pickles are excellent fried (see variation).
12 ounces green tomatoes, very thinly sliced
1 large white onion, sliced into thin rings
One 2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and sliced into about 8 thin disks
1 cup distilled white vinegar, white wine vinegar, or apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon sugar
Layer the green tomatoes, onion rings, and ginger in a quart-size glass container with a lid. Pour 1 cup water and the vinegar into a small saucepan, add the salt and sugar, and bring to a boil. Pour the brine over the vegetables, cover loosely, and let cool to room temperature. Seal the container tightly and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour before serving. The pickles will keep in the refrigerator for about 2 weeks.
VARIATION
fried green tomato and onion pickles Whoever first fried pickles was onto something great, and if you’ve never tried it, you should: crispy cornmeal crust around a tart, snappy pickle is a singular taste sensation. Since fried green tomatoes are a staple of the southern diet, it makes sense to fry green tomato pickles. It’s easy, too.
1 Heat 2 cups of peanut oil in a large skillet to 375°F.
2 Dredge 1 quart of green tomato and onion pickles in a mixture of ½ cup all-purpose flour, 3 tablespoons fine stone-ground cornmeal, 1 tablespoon dry bread crumbs, 2 teaspoons table salt, and 1½ teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper.
3 Fry the dredged pickles in batches, turning them as they become golden, until they’re golden brown all over, about 2 minutes per side. Serve in butcher-paper cones with fried oysters as a snack.
OYSTER COCKTAILS We love the salty, meaty oysters we harvest from local waters around Charleston, and we typically roast them over an open fire, shuck ’em, and slurp ’em down. Nothing fancy. When the globe-trotting food maven Anthony Bourdain recently came to town looking to find out how locals eat, we took him to meet our friend Sam Van Norte, a roaster par excellence who harvests them from the creek that runs through his farm on Edisto Island. Bourdain said it best to the camera when he downed his first oyster: “Delicious! Good oysters need no preparation.”
We couldn’t agree more. But on some occasions, we’re inclined to dress up our oysters, marinating them in a cocktail of sweet, sour, and aromatic elements that highlights their bracing brininess. Here are two of our favorite oyster cocktails. Serve them on a leaf of butter lettuce in stainless steel sundae cups, with a few saltines or endive leaves for scooping up the cocktail.
oyster shopping notes ••• Most fishmongers offer a couple varieties of oysters in the shell for shucking at home, and many will shuck the oysters for you for a $2 surcharge on the price of a dozen—a great value in our estimation. But unless you’re lucky enough to live in a coastal place like Charleston, the price of a dozen oysters in the shell may itself be prohibitive. Not to worry: most independent fish markets and the fish counters of larger grocery stores offer less expensive half-pint or pint-size plastic tubs of shucked oysters in their liquor. Packed in Washington State, Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana, North Carolina, or Florida, these oysters are mostly used in cooked preparations, but we often use them raw for our oyster cocktails, and we’ve never once been disappointed by their quality or freshness. Most containers are marked with a packing date and a use-by date, but as with any shellfish, if you’re concerned, don’t hesitate to ask your fishmonger if they