A St. Clair County culinary sensation
Story by Loyd McIntosh
Photos by Jerry Martin
Fried foods may be bad for the heart, but they’re oh so great for the soul.
Done right, a deep-fried anything can be heaven in a flaky golden container. Case in point, in an episode of the old WB television series Gilmore Girls titled “Deep Fried Thanksgiving” the character Jackson Belleville, Sookie’s main squeeze, insists on frying a turkey for Thanksgiving in the front yard. By the end of the evening Jackson and his buddies spend the remainder of Turkey Day deep frying anything they can get their hands on, including an old sneaker as the group eggs him on with the cheer of “deep fried shoe!”
Needless to say, we like our fried foods ‘round these parts. Golden battered catfish is practically a staple in Pell City, and it isn’t hard to find fried dill pickles throughout the county as well. But if there is one delicacy that is sure to get mouths watering and stomachs growling, it’s Frankie Underwood’s fried pies. If you’ve ever had one, then you know those fast food versions just can’t compare.
Born and raised in Ragland, Underwood and her husband have called Pell City home for more than 40 years. A ball of energy, Underwood has more oomph and vitality than most people half her age, and she shows no signs of slowing down at all. She worked for 30 years as a bank teller at Colonial Bank before attempting to retire, then working 10 more years as a teller at Metro Bank. She also has three booths at Landis Antiques, but she’s best known for her fried fruit pies she began cooking in her home kitchen around 20 years ago as a treat for her colleagues at Colonial. They were an immediate hit and, before she knew it, Underwood had herself a new career. “I didn’t decide to start a business. It just happened,” she says while talking from her kitchen table one Saturday morning in late August.
“I was working at the bank, and that’s when I started doing some, and all of a sudden, it just exploded. I’ve been doing this mess for 20 years, and I don’t know why I keep doing it,” she says with that infectious laugh sprinkled with a hefty dose of good-natured sarcasm. It’s hard not to smile and laugh a lot when talking with Underwood. She’s more than willing to tell an anecdote about NASCAR’s Bill France, Jr., buying up every cherry pie in stock at a local barbecue joint or how she for years toyed with a woman who has practically begged her to share her recipes and techniques. “It has driven her crazy. But I still won’t tell,” she says.
If you think you’re going to be the one to get any information about how she makes those pies, good luck. When asked what kind of cherries she uses in her cherry pies, Underwood’s response was, “I don’t tell.” She says the same thing when asked what type of oil – if it is indeed oil at all – she uses in her fryer. She was, however, surprisingly forthcoming with her technique for preparing apples for her best-selling apple pies. Due to costs, she recently had to switch from apples from The Apple Barn in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to a variety Underwood’s daughter Tanya Foster discovered online from New Jersey. There are several boxes of these apples waiting to be turned into fried pies. “After about 30 minutes of cooking these, I let them cool, I drain them, I put sugar on them and season them, put them back on the eye, and cook them again. Then, I drain them again and then I spread them out on paper towels to take up the excess liquid. And then, they’re ready to fry.”
That’s before she even begins the process of mixing the ingredients for the dough, rolling the individual pies, and filling them in her spotless home kitchen. She can fry up around 20 pies in a half hour, and currently churns out around 800 each month, which she then ships to special order customers as far away as Pennsylvania. She also sends pies to a few retail spots around town that do their best to keep in them in stock.
On average Underwood begins her day at 5 a.m. unless she has a big order to fill, then she may rise at 4 a.m. By 8 a.m., Underwood’s day of frying pies is complete, and she’s on to the next project, usually before most people have finished their first cup of coffee and answered the first e-mail. Sitting down and propping her feet up with a novel in her lap simply isn’t Underwood’s style.
“I’m crazy! I don’t know how to sit down and be still. I really don’t. To sit down and watch TV or read a book, that’s not in my category,” she explains. “I am a crazy person. I have to have every minute counting for something until I go to bed. Everybody says, ‘I wish I had your energy.’ I guess it’s just nervous energy. I’ve always been like that.”
The art of fried pies goes back at least 200 years, and is, of course, most popular in the South. According to Wikipedia, they’re also known as “crab lanterns,” but wherever that term originated from is anyone’s guess. They’re not specifically the domain of the South. New Hampshire native and 14th President Franklin Pierce was known to be a fan of the fried pie.
As with many traditions with a basis in folklore and rural roots, the fried pie is a dying culinary art. But Underwood remembers as a child growing up in Shoal Creek how her mother used to make them regularly, not as a special treat necessarily, but as a way to feed her family. “Back when my mom did them, they used to dry their own apples. They would turn them in these flour sacks and turn them in the sun every day. I never did do it, but I remember them doing it,” Underwood says. “Now, you just call and order them.”
Twenty years after frying up a batch for friends, Frankie’s Fried Pies is one of those American success stories. Underwood largely runs the part time business on her own, with the exception of her daughter, who helps print labels for the individual packages. “That’s all I can do,” Foster says. “That kitchen is her space.”
Underwood offers apple, cherry, sweet potato, lemon, and chocolate pies. She had to stop offering peach due to the rising cost of peaches. She claims she’s tried to quit the pie business on a couple of occasions, only to be lured back into it, to the delight of sweet tooths throughout the community. She said she knows there will come a day that she’ll hang up her apron for good and she’s made contingency plans to make sure her fried pies will live long into the future – assuming the younger generations will take the time to do it right.
“Tanya’s mother-in-law has been telling her ‘you need to find out how your momma does those pies so you can do them.’ They’re not going to do them,” she says. “It’s just not going to turn out as good because I know exactly what to do. I know exactly what to do with my apples, I know exactly what to do with my pie filling, and I know exactly how to do my sweet potatoes.
“When I decide I’m going to quit doing pies, I’m going to do a cookbook and put all of my secrets in it and sell cookbooks,” she adds. “I don’t have time to do it right now. That’s not my world.”