Peach Pocket Pies

For the past few days I've been craving... and I mean craving... a pocket pie. A peach pocket pie. It's strange; usually anything that doesn't involve chocolate is, in my humble opinion, a waste of precious dessert-allotted calories.

But I was thinking last night of peach pocket pies and suddenly I sat up straight(ish) in bed and gasped, My gosh, I don't have my Peach Pocket Pie recipe in the write-up of my cookbook. And just as suddenly I realized that I'd left out Potato Marbles and Carrot Ribbons and Corn Cakes. Where have I been? I thought I was finished with the recipes? What?

I'd always heard that pocket pies got their grand and glorious start in European mining communities. Using leftover meat and vegetables, wives would send their dutiful coal mining husbands off to work each morning with dinner scraps sealed inside baked-up crusts. Once lunch came around so would the miners and their pies, and together they'd heat their homemade hot pockets on shovels placed over burning coals.

I took that to be the history of the pocket pie until I read, just this week, that the baked beauties are also rumored to have begun in the pre-Victorian era, when cooks would tuck meat or fruit into pastry scraps and bake up several for the children of the house. They were, of course, easier for the little ones to handle and finish off than a proper meal. For those reasons, they soon became popular with servants and slaves as well.

But sure. The Greeks have their kolokotes. The Polish their pierogi. The Italians their calzone. The Spanish their empanada. But in the deep south, where I come from, it's all hail the fried pie.

Only I don't fry mine. Shoot me now, but I bake them up in the most flaky and delicate of sour cream crusts. Plus, in saving all the greasy calories, you can eat an extra one or get yours with a scoop of Blue Bell Natural Vanilla Bean ice cream.

So, hmmm. Guess it's my peach pocket pies at the firepit tonight. (Oh, hello footing. Is that you I'm finding again?) Because I could cry over him forever but I just can't. Not as long as I still have the perfect peach pocket pie recipe to share....