Our memories of food at home seem most often linked to our mothers, or our grandmothers. Learning that yeast needs warm water, why you need to cook the flour in a sauce, and how to smell when things are done – this is all distinctly maternal wisdom.
But my father was a gardener, and I can’t taste a late-August field tomato without thinking of him thickly slicing our backyard bounty for our summer suppers. For about a month every year, there was a plate of tomatoes and a plate of cucumbers on the table nearly every night. You could eat as much of both as you liked.
And on Saturday afternoons, my Dad was in charge of lunch, which was either French toast or grilled cheese sandwiches. The sandwiches came with side orders of home-canned bread-and-butter pickles, and if you were lucky, a little doily of crispy cheese that had run out of the sandwich and onto the griddle.
So this tomato platter with frico (fried cheese) is for me doubly evocative of good times in the kitchen with Dad. We didn’t have extra-virgin olive oil in those days, or balsamic vinegar, or fancy salts. But when something tastes like your back yard, it doesn’t really need any extra help.
Tomatoes and frico
NOTE: You can use Grana Padano, or any other hard grating cheese, in place of the Parmigiano-Reggiano. A cup of grated cheese will make three large pieces of frico, or about six smaller ones.
Sliced tomatoes
Basil leaves or other mild herbs
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper
Parmigiano-Reggiano
Grate the cheese, and heat a non-stick skillet over medium-low heat. Sprinkle the cheese into the skillet in one or two long ovals, and turn the heat to low. When the shiny bubbles in the cheese begin to subside and the cheese is lightly browned, loosen the edges with a soft rubber spatula, and then carefully peel the oval off in one piece. Brown the other side. If you wish, you can drape the hot cheese over a tall narrow glass, to give it an elegant curve. Don’t worry if the frico breaks into pieces. It tastes just as delicious.
Arrange the tomato slices and basil leaves on a large platter. Drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Serve the frico on the side.
The freshness of the tomatoes seems to work perfectly with the frico! This sounds absolutely delicious
Thanks, Wei-Wei, when are you coming over for dinner?
This looks like a perfect lunch to me. Gorgeous shot of those tomatoes!
Does it get any better than that, really? Beautiful photos. Perfect summer meal–we’re finally getting good heirlooms here in the Bay Area!
The heirlooms are just arriving at the market here too. You can do this with just about any tomato, but the heirlooms come in all these great shapes, sizes and colours!
A beautiful tribute to the power of memory to enrich our meals. Love how you’ve saved the essence but brought it into your more sophisticated present.
Simple, beautiful, bountiful! I wanted to make frico after seeing it on an episode of Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie and forgot about it! Glad you posted this and jolted my memory.