George Washington Carver published this pie recipe below in 1918, in the middle of a war that had the federal government lecturing every household in the country about not wasting food. He had been making that argument at Tuskegee for twenty-two years by then, and he made it with numbers: two-thirds of the South's fruit and tons of its vegetables rotted every season, when drying, canning, and preserving could have carried a family through winter and spring. A green tomato is exactly that kind of loss waiting to happen—fruit still hanging on the vine when frost arrives, worth nothing at market and nothing to the household that grew it. Carver's answer was to treat it as dessert. He ranked the tomato among the crops that made a family garden one of the best money-makers on a farm, because it fed the household first and still left a surplus to sell, and because a cook could put it on the table every day of the week without anyone tiring of it. He also valued it as medicine, calling it a relish and an appetizer as much as a food. This recipe closed out Bulletin 36, one of thirty-nine bulletins Carver wrote, printed, and mailed free to anyone in the South who asked—farmers were still writing him for copies decades later. That is what makes a pie like this worth our attention. It converts a failed crop into a meal, and the instructions for doing so cost the farmer nothing but the price of a stamp.
Green Tomato Pie Recipe
Ingredients
Green tomatoes, sliced very thin
Lemon juice
Brown sugar
1 tablespoon butter
Preserved ginger, cut in little bits
Lemon peel, chopped
Cinnamon
Flour, for dredging
Rich pastry, for the top crust
Directions
Slice the tomatoes very thin; sprinkle with lemon juice rather generously; sweeten with brown sugar; dot a tablespoon of butter evenly over the pie; cut some preserved ginger in little bits, and scatter evenly over the pie, also a little chopped lemon peel, and a dusting of cinnamon, after which dredge some flour over the top to keep it from being too juicy, and cover with rich paste. This is said to be a very rich pie.
George Washington Carver, How to Grow the Tomato and 115 Ways to Prepare It for the Table, Bulletin 36 (Tuskegee, AL: Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute Experiment Station, Institute Press, 1918), 38.