Tomato Pie

While southerners were the first North Americans to embrace the tomato as a culinary ingredient—baking it in casseroles, frying it, preserving it in sugar, pureeing it into soups, and rendering it into sauce by 1810—they were not the first to make tomato pies. All of the earliest pie notices date from the 1830s. All come from New England. A widely republished article from the Springfield MA Republican in 1838 announced that tomato pie (a sugared version) was the equal of elderberry or gooseberry.