Thanksgiving Day Series: Part 2 Using the Last Fruits of the Growing Season

Smothered shrimp over fried green tomatoes, recipe below

Here’s a dish I created that’s rooted in sustainable gardening. This time of the year, gardens in the north east are producing their last fruits of the growing season: herbs, cucumbers, green peppers, green tomatoes. Here is a really good sautéed shrimp served with a gravy over crisp fried green garden tomatoes. My family love it and it’s a very inexpensive recipe made with garden tomatoes and a $9.95 bag of pre-cleaned, shelled, and cooked bag of shrimp from Costco.In doing research for my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/tableOfContents, I a came across a document on 1940s low country South Carolina and the use of shrimp among whites and blacks. I found that during the summer better off white families ate shrimp dishes like “fried shrimp” for breakfast, and shrimp and stew for dinner. For African Americans, shrimp appeared at only one time, and it was on a fall menu as the breakfast dish “shrimp and gravy.” Thus shrimp consumption in the low country became an indicator of race, class, and cultural identity, and a juncture at which different eating traditions developed rooted in income differences. The bottom line is throughout history people have eaten what they could catch, grow, and afford to purchase. Here is my recipe below:

Fred’s Smothered Shrimp over Fried Green Tomatoes

Ingredients

4 to 6 medium size green tomatoes

1 cup diced onions

¼ cup diced green pepper

Fresh sage and or parsley

Garlic cloves

Sea salt

Fresh ground pepper

1lb of shrimp

½ cup canola or other vegetable oil

1 cup of flour

Method

Sauté 4 cups of cleaned shrimp in canola oil with a garlic clove, ¼ cup diced green pepper, ¼ cup diced onions, add a bit of fresh, sage, parsley, and salt and pepper. Set the shrimp aside after they are cooked. Prepare fried green tomatoes with 5 large tomatoes. Then put the fried green tomatoes on a cookie sheet and bake for about 12 minutes at 325. Use the leftover oil from frying the tomato to make gravy adding flour and water to make it. Then add the sautéed shrimp. Remove the now crisp fried green tomatoes from the oven and arrange them on a large platter. Pour the smothered shrimp over the fried green tomatoes and serve. Recipe, which serves about 6, would be a hit on Thanksgiving.