By Karen-Parr Moody
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – An old Southern standby, deep-fried pies are not exactly seen on every corner anymore. They tend to be the stuff of grandmas and great-grandmas, not the domain of modern moms who are whipping out dinner in 30 minutes and corralling children to do homework.
Fried pies are labor-intensive, one-serving delicacies stuffed with yummy fillings. Their crusts are crimped at their curved edges, much like a turnover, creating crescent-shaped pockets of deliciousness.
Shelly Strange of My Oh My Fried Pies admits that for every hour she spends selling her pies at Clarksville’s Downtown Market, there are 10 more hours of prep work she does in her huge home kitchen.
“My poor feet, that’s all I can complain about,” Strange says cheerily.
But when customers bite into the pies, they can be thankful that Strange put in the effort. The flakey dough yields to unveil a rich filling of peach, apple, lemon, chocolate or cherry – and during the holidays, coconut and pumpkin.
Three of Shelly Strange’s pie flavors are shown here; they include peach, lemon and apple. She also makes chocolate and cherry, along with coconut and pumpkin during Thanksgiving and Christmas./Karen Parr-Moody
Four years ago Strange, a school nurse, was looking for an enterprise to bring in a little extra money in the summer.
“The thought just occurred to me that my little grandmother used to make fried pies and it’s pretty much a dying art,” she says. “They’re really, really hard to find.”
Never having made fried pies, Strange enlisted her husband, Jerry, to help her figure out the right dough. This took them a couple of days.
Unlike her grandmother, Gertie Brunson Elrod, who fried her peach, apple and apricot pies in a skillet, Strange uses a deep fryer. The crust, she says, is “made from scratch and rolled out the old-timey way.” And it is the crust that she thinks wins the customers over.
“It’s not heavy,” Strange says. “It’s lighter than what most fried pies are. I don’t know if it’s my recipe or the fact that I deep fat fry it. But it’s the crust that people are just crazy about.” Strange’s favorite flavor is peach, but she says the biggest seller is apple.
“Apple sells two to one over everything else,” she says. “Peach is the second in line.”
Strange sells the pies every Saturday at the Downtown Market, which occurs from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at One Public Square through October. She also sells them year-round at Miss Lucille’s Marketplace at 2231-A Madison Street in Sango.
For more information, she can be reached at myohmyfriedpies@yahoo.com.
Karen Parr-Moody began a career as a New York journalist, working as a fashion reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, a beauty editor for Young Miss and a beauty and fashion writer for both In Style and People magazines. Regionally, she has been a writer at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper and currently writes about arts and culture for Nashville Arts magazine each month.