Lucille's Tomato Sandwich

The next dish we're going to be working on is such a simple dish

It's just incredibly simple. But Savannah would not dream of having the girls over for lunch

or a cocktail party without these delicate, tasty little sandwiches. In fact, I don't know if you've read John Barrett's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

but it talks about the parties that Jim Williams used to throw

and there was one lady in town that was the only person

that was allowed to cater his parties, and her name was Miss Lucille Wright

And I'm sorry to say that she's no longer with us, but Jim would not have a party without her

and people would just die to get an invitation to his parties

And we're gonna make Miss Lucille's tomato sandwiches today. I'm gonna start by dropping our tomatoes

in some boiling water just until the skin splits. We're not gonna keep them in there very long

And now we're gonna dunk them in ice water very quickly because we don't want the tomato to cook

because we're using a fresh ripe tomato. This is just gonna help us slip the skin off easier

And if you don't want to do this, you could actually peel the skin with a paring knife

Miss Lucille was so highly sought after by Savannah Society that if a lady called to book a party with Miss Lucille

and she was already booked the ladies wouldn go find another caterer They would reschedule their party Now that how much they thought of Miss Lucille and all of her food

All right, we can see that the skin is split, and that's the last one

So I'm going to turn that off. All right, we're going to get these peeled now

I've got them good and chilled. But these parties that Jim Williams threw were the height of Savannah society

Everybody sat around at Christmas time just waiting, hoping and praying that they wouldn't

be called from the Christmas list. All right, we're going to take these out and let them drain a little bit

This is a very, very simple sandwich to make, but I just want to give you a couple of tips

that will make your tomato sandwiches even better. You'll want to size up your bread with your tomatoes, so you wouldn't want to go out and

buy a tomato this big when you're making tomato sandwiches. And you can see that I've got my biscuit cutter over here, and you see that the sizes are

going to match real good. So all we're going to do now is put these tomatoes on a paper towel to drain

And we're just going to sprinkle these with a little seasoning, and that salt is going

to pull the water out of the tomato so that we won't have soggy tomato sandwiches

And plus it'll give it a zippy little flavor. We're going to take our bread

and I like to do only one slice at the time which is a little slower but that just the way I like to do it And don throw away these because you can save them and put them in the skillet in the morning

put your child's egg in the center, and have Popeyes for breakfast

They also make great croutons. This is a nice, fresh bread. Speaking of fresh bread, you have to be careful that it's not too, too fresh

because it'll be hard to cut. But this is just right. And you can do all this the day before

You can get you a plastic container and cut your bread and then dampen you very, very lightly

Dampen some paper towels and cover them in that and they'll be just as fresh tomorrow

because you really don't want to make your sandwiches ahead of time

You want to kind of do them at the last minute. In fact, I've done many a party where I'm behind the scenes in the back putting these

these tomato sandwiches together just as quickly as I can. Now you can play with this, but I'm gonna follow this

just like Miss Lucille did it. And that's mayonnaise, a little salt

fresh ground pepper, a little shake of accent, and some fresh grated onion will really produce

a lot a lot of strong onion flavor In fact I can feel it running down my fingers right now This one got a lot of juice in it So just a little You know I never knew Jim

Williams. When I moved to Savannah back in the 80s, I can't remember if he had

just gone to jail or he had just died. Either way it was bad news. So we're

We're just going to smear just a little on the bread. So this is all we're going to do

And just top them. And aren't they pretty? And I'm going to do one thing that Miss Lucille doesn't do

And I just found that this makes my plate pretty. All we're going to do is dab my finger ever so lightly in mayonnaise, dab it onto the breads

and this is going to act as a glue. I'm going to take a little petal of parsley and stick on each of those dabs of mayonnaise

and it just adds a nice little touch of color. So that gets them all ready

Renny, you look so sad, girl, but I'm sorry. These are for me