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Mammy's Fried Pies
Stew dried apples, peaches or apricots. Drain off all juice, mash well and sweeten. Roll pie-crust one-eighth inch thick and cut circles three inches in diameter. On one of the circles place a spoonful of the filling, having a clear margin of the pie-crust. Moisten this edge all around, place another circle on top and press the edges firmly together. Fry in deep fat like doughnuts or saute with a little fat in a hot frying-pan, turning the pie so that it will brown on both sides. These are good with fillings of mince meat or cooked rice.
The recipe assumes you know your own pie-crust and your own frying kettle; what it does not tell you is the fat temperature or how dry the filling must be. Both decide whether the pies hold together.
- Dry the filling hardStew the dried fruit only until tender, then drain and cook the mash down until a spoonful holds its shape on the spoon. Wet filling steams inside the pie, forces the seam open and spits fat.
- Fat temperatureDeep-fry at 365-375F. Below that the crust soaks; much above it and the pastry colors before the interior sets. A thermometer is worth more here than any visual test.
- Quantities left openNo amount of pastry, fruit or sugar is given. Figure roughly a double-crust quantity of dough (about 2 1/2 cups flour) with 2 cups stewed dried fruit, sweetened to taste — dried apricots need noticeably more sugar than apples.
- SealingMoisten the margin with water, not egg wash, which slides. Press with a fork and leave a good 1/4 inch of clear crust all round; a filling that reaches the edge will leak.
- Two circles or one foldThe two-round method here gives a flatter pie. Cutting 4-inch rounds and folding into half-moons is the same dish with fewer scraps and one less seam to fail.
- SauteingThe pan-fried version needs a moderate heat and patience — perhaps 3 to 4 minutes a side in a shallow film of fat. Rushing it browns the outside while the crust inside stays raw.
- YieldThree-inch rounds from a double-crust batch give about 14 to 16 small pies, two per person as a dessert.
- DrainingLift onto a rack, not paper, so the underside does not sit in its own fat and soften.
Fried pies belong to the dried-fruit economy of the American South and Appalachia, where apples and peaches were sliced and sun- or attic-dried in quantity each autumn and reconstituted through the winter. Because they need no oven, they could be made on a stovetop or over an open hearth and carried in a pocket to the field, and they are often associated with field and camp cookery as much as with the table. That this one appears under a title trading on the stock figure of the Southern black cook suggests how publishers of the period marketed regional recipes to a national readership: authenticity was signaled by dialect and caricature rather than by place. The technique itself is old and widespread — sealed fruit turnovers cooked in fat appear across Europe and Latin America — and the closing note about mince meat and cooked rice fillings is a reminder that the form mattered more than the contents.