Emma Lou's Fried Apple Pies

          I didn't grow up in the post-bellum days of Faulkner's South, and my family wasn't of the upper classes like some of the Yoknapatawpha County families of Faulkner's fiction. Nonetheless, Emma Lou, the "colored maid" of my childhood, could have walked right out of Absalom Absalom!

       Emma Lou came by bus twice a week to help my mother with the housework and innumerable chores of a family of seven. She watched the babies, picked up toys, dusted furniture, ran the vacuum cleaner, mopped the kitchen, and stuffed load after load of dirty clothes and diapers into the washing machine. Then she ironed. She was big and sloppy-looking and chewed snuff. She had a ready laugh and a comfortable, capable, motherly disposition. Everyone loved Emma Lou—my mother because she was such good help, the children because she was a reassuring, secure presence, and my father because she made fried apple pies.

Emma Lou's were bigger and better.

        No one could make those pies better than Emma Lou, not even the Varsity, downtown Atlanta's drive-in restaurant famous for that delicacy. The Varsity version was as Twinkies compared to Emma Lou's. It was always a good day when I came home from after-school band practice and walked into the kitchen to find apple peels piled on newspaper and Emma Lou rolling pastry on the kitchen counter. She would be cutting a dozen disks to fill with apple pieces and pinch together into half-moon shapes with deeply scalloped edges. During dinner in the sunporch, where we ate around a round table, the family first smelled oil heating to the smoking point in the kitchen, then heard pastries sizzle as Emma Lou dropped them into the oil. As I carried empty plates to the kitchen after dinner, I saw hot fried pies, maple-leaf brown, draining on paper towels and more pies browning quickly in an uprise of golden bubbles in the oil.

          We ate them hot, hot, hot. The pieces of apple were still whole, entirely soft, and surrounded with sugary juices inside a crisp pastry that broke into fluttering flakes, like flower petals in a sudden gale, when I bit into my pie. Steam escaped from the bitten opening and equally from my mouth as though the steam, too, had been sliced by my teeth. When that bite, held still in my mouth, had cooled enough for me to begin to chew, the rich flavors rolled over my tongue. Eating Emma Lou's fried apple pies put my father—put all of us—in a state of ecstasy.

          I haven't had that Southern pastry since my childhood, but if I were to eat one again (the probability is small, since Emma Lou is gone), the taste and aroma would catapult me into the kitchen of my childhood where a black woman who was not a nanny and not quite a mammy, neither friend nor family but in that uncategorizable position of a Dilsey to the Compsons, was making the world's best fried apple pies. In that memory she endures.

Next week: "Hippie Breadmakers Bargain with the Farmers"

Recipe from this post: Fried apple pie

FRIED APPLE PIE

I don't have Emma Lou's recipe for fried apple pies. She didn't use one, of course, and I didn't ask her to tell me how to make them. There are a number of recipes available. The one below is the most basic and probably the closest to Emma Lou's. I could be wrong, though. She might have put all sorts of other things in her pies. But what I remember is the deep apple flavor in those crisp hot shells. Maybe this comes close. (Update, years later: Now that I have made the recipe, I can tell you that it doesn't come close. Emma Lou's apple pies were larger and therefore had a better ratio of apple to pastry. Also she obviously didn't use Honeycrisp apples, first because there weren't any Honeycrisp apples at that time, but she wouldn't have, anyway, because Honeycrisp apples are insipid, especially when cooked. Try Granny Smiths. Or, as in the recipe, Macintoshes.)

Makes 6-8 fried pies

Pastry
Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup shortening, chilled
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup cold water
To make
Sift flour and salt together. Cut in the shortening with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add cold water 1 tablespoon at a time and mix with a fork. When the flour mixture is moistened, gather it into a ball, wrap it in plastic, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.







Apple filling
Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter
4 Macintosh apples (This is the kind of apple my father preferred.)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Preparation
Peel, core, and slice apples. Squeeze lemon.
To make
Filling: Melt the butter in a large sauté pan. Add the apples, sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice. Cook over medium heat until the apples are soft, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and cool.

The pies
Ingredients
Pie dough
Apple filling
Oil for frying
To make
On a lightly floured work surface, roll dough to 1/8-inch thickness. Cut 4-inch rounds with a cookie cutter. In each round, place 1 heaping tablespoon fruit. Moisten edges with cold water, fold in half, and press edge with a fork to seal. Repeat with the remaining pastry and filling. Heat oil in a deep-fat fryer or large saucepan to 375º. Fry the pies, a few at a time, 2 to 3 minutes on each side, until the crust is golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Serve piping hot!