‘Heaven on a plate’

It’s four o’clock in the morning. Even the early-rising cattlemen haven’t arrived at the Kingsport Livestock Auction. But across the parking lot, Betty Jones has just turned on the lights at Betty’s Stockyard Café.

She immediately heads for the refrigerator, where she takes out a bowl of dough. Along the counter, she lines up cans of fruity pie filling. Then she heats a pot of oil. Betty’s mission, this morning, is to make fried pies.

Long before she opened her homey café just off Highway 93 in Kingsport, Tennessee, she fried pies. Betty grew up in Dryden, Virginia. Her parents had 15 children naturally and adopted another. At age 10, she was given the responsibility of cooking for that large farm family.

Her mother, Margaret Freeman, taught her to make fried pies. Like many Appalachian cooks, Margaret fried hers in a black-iron skillet.

The term “hand pies” is often used synonymously with “fried,” but that would be inaccurate in Betty’s case. Few human hands approach the size of a Betty Jones fried pie.

There are no tables at Betty’s Stockyard Café. Privacy and isolation are pleasantly impossible. Camaraderie and conversation begin when the first customers take seats around the U-shaped counter at six o’clock in the morning.

Despite slabs of fried pork tenderloin, gravy-laden patties of country sausage, or bowls of Betty’s pork-seasoned soup beans with plate-sized sides of fried cornbread, most customers put all resistance and dietary rules aside when they learn that Betty has been frying pies.

“There’s nothing better than making food for people. It’s a primal thing,” says Dale Mackey, whose full-time job is frying pies in Knoxville, Tennessee. Unlike Betty, Dale didn’t develop her love of fried pies on a rural Appalachian farm. She learned to appreciate them in Chicago. But her godmother, Pat McGraw, had grown up near Pikeville, Kentucky.

“I grew up eating a lot of Southern food,” recalls Dale. “It felt like my childhood food, although I was eating it in Chicago.”

After graduating from Iowa’s Grinnell College, Dale went to work for the media, arts, and education center Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and then did a stint in community television in Knoxville, Tennessee.

In 2012, at the beginning of the food truck movement, she turned those sweet memories of childhood into a business, Dale’s Fried Pies.

With $400, she opened what she calls “an adult-sized lemonade stand” and stocked it with fried pies. A friend allowed her to use a commercial kitchen free of charge. Within a year, Dale’s business became a full-time endeavor, even though there’s never been a storefront. Dale sets up her pie trailer regularly at the Market Square Farmers Market in downtown Knoxville. And she sells pies via the Internet.

While offering traditional Appalachian fried pie fillings like apple, peach, and cherry, Dale also crafts over 60 different pies, both sweet and savory.

“I’m a savory person,” she says. “I love our curried sweet potato pie, which reminds you of an Indian samosa.”

She’s equally ecstatic over pies filled with her own homemade pimento cheese and a little bacon.

“Most of the savory pies have a cornmeal crust,” she says. “And I do a vegan crust, with olive oil instead of butter.”

Among the flavors on the sweet side of the menu are carrot cake and cream cheese, gingerbread chocolate chip, and peanut butter and jelly.

“There are so many opportunities for creativity, because you can basically fill them with anything,” she says. In the words of her theme song, written and sung by Tim Marema, they’re “heaven on a plate.”

Like fried pie makers have done for generations, Dale crimps every pie with a dinner fork.

In Johnson City, Tennessee, fried pies, in rows of eight on a conveyor belt, weave an hour-long, serpentine trek around the second floor of Seaver’s Bakery. By the time they crawl up to the third story, the half-moon-shaped confections are cool and ready to be slipped into glassine packages.

The family recipe and the fillings haven’t changed since Bud Seaver opened the bakery in 1949. He devised a way to mass-produce fried pies, first making them for Honey Krust Bakery and then going out on his own. He eventually outgrew the basement of his parents’ house and constructed the putty-colored building where Seaver’s pies are still made today.

Apple has always been the most popular filling, made from dried, steam-cooked Granny Smiths. The late Richard McKinney, who ran the bakery, once told me that old-timers preferred raisin pies. All of Seaver’s packages are labeled “fruit pie,” even the chocolate.

“Ninety-nine percent of all country women made fried pies,” says Calvin Ward, who once sold Seaver’s pies on store routes across Southern Appalachia.

For the farm or the factory, fried pies are the perfect lunchbox snack or dessert. They have a two-week shelf life, they’re portable, and they don’t require a knife and fork.

Route sales went by the wayside long ago, and the Seaver’s business may have, too, were it not for the regional grocery chain Food City, based in Abingdon, Virginia. Each store is now stocked with a full line of Seaver’s pies.

“They’re a very popular item with their unique crust,” says Steve Smith, President and CEO of Food City.

No matter the method or the filling, fried pies bring forth memories. At The Market Place in Asheville, North Carolina, Chef William Dissen revives the spirit of his West Virginia grandmother by frying pies filled with Virginia Beauty apples or local cherries.

“My grandmother, Jane Sturgill, from Sandyville, West Virginia, made a crust with lard or bacon grease and fried her pies in a cast-iron skillet,” remembers Dissen. “Once they cooled, she’d dust them with powdered sugar, and they tended to disappear really quickly.”

At a country café in Kingsport, on the streets of downtown Knoxville, in a Johnson City factory, and on the tables of a trendy Asheville restaurant, the age-old tradition of frying pies lives on.

Fred Sauceman’s latest book is Buttermilk & Bible Burgers: More Stories from the Kitchens of Appalachia.