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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 sauté 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.
A straightforward turnover, but the whole thing stands or falls on how dry the filling is. Everything else is technique you already have.
- Drain the fruit hardThe instruction to drain off all juice and mash well is the hinge. Wet filling turns to steam in the fryer, forces the seam open and empties the pie into the fat. The cooked fruit should hold its shape on a spoon, closer to a thick jam than a compote.
- Stewing dried fruitCover dried apples, peaches or apricots with water, simmer until completely soft, then drain and mash. Sweeten after draining, not before, since the syrup you pour off would otherwise carry the sugar with it. Sulphured dried fruit holds colour better; unsulphured will cook darker and taste more concentrated.
- Fat temperature"Fry in deep fat like doughnuts" gives no figure; the usual doughnut-frying range is roughly 365-375F. Below that the pastry absorbs grease before it sets; above it the crust colours before the seam has cooked through. Fry a few at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- SealingMoisten the margin with water, as the recipe directs, and press the edges firmly; a fork gives an even crimp. A three-inch circle rolled an eighth of an inch thick will only take a small spoonful of filling -- perhaps a rounded teaspoon -- if the clear margin the recipe asks for is to survive. Overfilled pies split along the crimp.
- Sauté methodSauté method -- The pan-fried alternative uses perhaps a quarter inch of fat over medium heat, three to four minutes a side. The result is flatter and crisper than the deep-fried version and less prone to blowouts.
- Mince meatPeriod mincemeat generally contained suet and often beef, and was usually cooked or matured before it went into a pie. Modern jarred mincemeat is often fruit-and-spice only, though some still contain suet; either works the same way here, and either needs to be as dry as the fruit filling.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. A standard double-crust quantity of pastry, rolled thin and cut in three-inch rounds with the scraps re-rolled, gives roughly eighteen to twenty rounds -- that is, nine or ten pies, since each takes two.
- ServingEat these warm rather than hot; the filling holds heat far longer than the crust suggests. A dusting of granulated or powdered sugar while the pies are still greasy is a common finish, though the recipe does not call for it.
Fried pies belong to the dried-fruit economy of the American South and Appalachia, where apples and peaches were sliced and dried on racks or roofs in late summer and stewed back to life all winter. They cook on a stovetop rather than in an oven, which mattered in households where firing a range for a single pie was wasteful, and they travel in a pocket or a lunch pail, which is why they show up in field and mill contexts as often as at table. The name printed here reflects the "Mammy" figure of early twentieth-century white American publishing, a caricature that attached itself to a great many Southern recipes in national cookbooks of the period and told readers to expect something rustic and supposedly authentic; the attribution is more likely a marketing convention than a record of an actual cook, though that cannot be established with certainty. The closing suggestion of a rice filling is a reminder that the form was flexible and thrifty long before it was picturesque.