Fried pie, a popular dessert throughout the South and signature sweet of Atlanta’s Varsity Drive-In, is a single-serving crescent of pie-crust pastry dough pinched around traditional fillings—apple, peach, apricot, sweet potato— and deep-fried until brittle. Unlike a slice from a whole pie, a fried pie is portable. Among favorite convenience-store snacks around the Gulf Coast is a Hubig’s “New Orleans Style Pie,” a fried pie made by a company founded over a century ago in Texas. Hubig’s pies, made with fruit or sweet potato filling, are packed in a sturdy crust with a sugar glaze, and although they readily crumble, they often are spotted in the hand that a driver does not have on his steering wheel.
Fried peach pie at the Family Pie Shop, De Valls Bluff, Arkansas.