Tomato Pie

When someone says pie this time of year, one generally thinks of cherry pie, peach pie, blackberry pie—you know, the sweet ones that beg for a dollop of vanilla ice cream to melt down over a warm crust. But with the heat of summer also comes the first vine-ripened tomatoes. For me, nothing says welcome to summer more than a tomato pie.

Depending on what part of the country you’re from, a pie might be more like a pizza. When Italian immigrants first arrived in the United States around 1800, pizza was called pie. It had a crust and was sliced in triangles so Americans first called the exotic concoction tomato pie. To this day my Italian friends from New York and New Jersey still refer to pizza only as pie.

The first commercial Italian pies were sparsely topped with crushed tomatoes, grated hard dry cheese and olive oil as they were meant to keep without refrigeration. Mozzarella, meats, and assorted toppings would come much later. Now you can get a pie topped with everything but the kitchen sink.

But the Italians don’t have a corner on tomato pie. Southerners have been making tomato pie long before Italian immigrants arrived according to early published recipes archives that sometime refer to it as Kentucky pie or Alabama pie. Unlike the open-topped pizzas and tortas (the European name for pizza), southerners put a lid on theirs.

Another significant difference is the filling--cheese is mixed with white sauce or mayonnaise. I’ve seen southern tomato pie recipes that called for cheddar and ones with taco seasoning and jalapeños mixed in with the cheese. I guess that would be considered southern as in south of the border.

But wait! There’s another cultural version of tomato pie. The Greeks want in on the action. You can’t go wrong with phyllo and feta with fresh tomatoes in the recipe. Add in some big Kalamata olives and oregano and you’ve got dinner.

The French make pie even easier with their galettes—no pan. Roll out a crust, put sliced tomatoes, cheese, olive oil, maybe thinly sliced sweet onions in the center, fold up the edges to make a square with the center peeking out and bake until bubbly and brown. Ooo-la-la!

While the majority of tomato pie recipes you’ll find are savory, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention green tomato pie (after all, tomatoes are fruit). Despite their reputation as a staple of southern cooking, the first green tomato pie recipe was printed in a Chicago newspaper in 1877 as a mock apple pie combining the hard, unripen fruit with sugar and cinnamon baked in a pie crust.

Tomato pie, regardless of the recipe style, call for the tomatoes to the diced, sliced, or crushed, but I also want to offer another version that offers an amazing outcome—use those fantastic and flavorful bite-sized tomatoes which are now at the market in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. A quick rinse, toss with ingredients and bake in a shell. That’s what I call an easy meal.