It's Not Fried Cucumbers: Tomatoes Portland

End of summer means tomatoes. For me, it always sends me back to Grandpa's garden, and stealing tomatoes, warm from the sun, right off the vine. The Portland Woman's Exchange Cook Book has a suitably Oregonian way to enjoy the season's tomatoes:

Tomatoes Portland

Select some small tomatoes about the size of walnuts and cut a slice from each in the region of the stalk. Squeeze out all their water and seeds, and marinate them for 10 minutes. Prepare a mince of crab legs with oil, salt, paprika and tarragon vinegar, and add thereto per 2 ounces of the crab 1/2 a tablespoon of chopped parsley, chervil and tarragon and a small hard-boiled egg, also chopped. Thicken the whole with 1 tablespoon of thick mayonnaise, put it into a bag fitted with smallest tube, using enough of mayonnaise to form a kind of dome upon each tomato.

By courtesy Chef of Portland Hotel.

I have never used the word "thereto" in writing a recipe, myself. I'm completely charmed by describing tomatoes as "the size of walnuts" -- I think we're safe substituting cherry tomatoes, aren't you?

For the crab, use Dungeness if you can get it. It's an Oregonian recipe, after all -- Dungeness is the only way to go. I know that, having spent more than half my life a stone's throw from the Chesapeake means I should be a blue crab devotée, but... I'm just not. There's nothing like the sweet wonderfulness of Dungeness. It is the crab.

The last recipe on the page is for fried cucumbers. As in: cut one in half, dredge it in eggs, roll it in cracker crumbs, and fry. ...I swear, that's not really Oregon food. Honest.