Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Today, Frances Davis will take 100 fried apple pies to the sixth annual Virginia Folklife Apprentice Showcase in Charlottesville.

Frances Davis (left) laughs with her sister Annie Elaine James as they make fried apple pies in Davis' Rocky Mount home. Davis is being honored as a master folklife artist for her cooking and is teaching her sister how to bake as part of the Virginia Folklife Programs Folklife Apprenticeship.

ROCKY MOUNT -- If Frances Davis ever wrote out a recipe for her famous fried apple pies, her measurements wouldn't include any cups or tablespoons. She measures most everything by the handful.

Standing in her cozy kitchen, Davis poured half a bag of Gold Medal flour into an aluminum mixing bowl, added two handfuls of baking soda, then reached into a can of Crisco and pulled out a softball-sized handful of shortening and dropped it into the mix.

She sounded almost apologetic when she said, "I'm so used to knowing exactly what to put in."

She needn't apologize, not for measuring by hand or for the greasy goodness of her signature pies. Davis, who has been specializing in country cuisine for nearly 50 years, isn't just a cook, she's an artist. Master artist, in fact.

Davis is one of nine "master artists" participating in the Folklife Apprenticeship program sponsored by the Virginia Folklife Program. The program identifies people skilled in traditional art forms who work with apprentices for nine months to pass along those traditions.

In the seven-year history of the program, more than 60 fiddlemakers, duck-decoy carvers, ballad singers, dollmakers and other traditional artisans have played mentor to students eager to preserve and perpetuate Virginia's traditional arts.

Not much she can't cook

Davis' pies are an art form, to be sure. Stuffed with dried apples that have been boiled down with sugar and allspice into a sweet sauce, her half-moon pies are fried in an electric skillet and served hot. That's why she has earned a $200 monthly honorarium the past nine months to teach piemaking to her apprentice, who happens to be her younger sister, Annie Elaine James of Franklin County.

James is a good cook in her own right, but one who prefers modern-day casseroles, Italian and Mexican dishes to her sister's country cooking. James didn't learn the old-time recipes like her sister did.

"I never really did have to do" the cooking, James said. "I was always out in the field."

That would have been on the Pittsylvania County tobacco farm, where Davis, 59, and James, 50, were two of 10 children raised by sharecropper parents. While her father and siblings worked the farm, Davis, the oldest daughter, stayed in the kitchen, helping her mother cook for all the hungry farmhands.

"I'd make big pans, big skillets of food," she said. "And it'd get eaten up."

Her specialties were a menu of rural favorites that would eventually come to be called "soul food," following mass migration of Southern blacks to the industrial North. Her father raised and butchered hogs, which made up a major part of the family diet. Davis cooked chops, jowls and chitterlings (or "chitlins"). Fat was rendered into lard. Like the old saying goes, country people could use every part of a pig except the squeal.

"If it's edible, I can cook it," Davis said.

She cooked rabbits and squirrels. She even knew how to fix the frogs, eels and turtles her brothers gigged in the country creeks and rivers. Once in awhile, they'd bring her an opossum. Those are traditional recipes she would rather not pass on.

"I could cook it, but I did not like it," she said. "I got up to where I would still do it, but I had control over what I put in my mouth."

She moved to Franklin County in the 10th grade and eventually went to work at Ferrum College, where she took classes part time and earned a degree in social work. She worked as a special education teacher, then moved to her present home near Rocky Mount after the death of her husband, Brinder Lee Davis, in 2003. She has an adopted adult son.

Not just about nostalgia

In her kitchen, Davis instructed her sister how to properly roll out the dough -- flat as a tortilla. The sisters spooned cooked apples onto the dough, folded the pies into crescent shapes, then crinkled the edges with flour-coated forks before dropping the pies into hot grease.

"You got this one wop-sided," Davis admonished her sister, "but I'll show you what I can do for him."

Fried apple pie is a tradition that actually made its way to Virginia with the southward migration of Pennsylvania Germans in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to Roddy Moore, director of the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College. By the time the recipe got to Western Virginia, European and African cultures embraced the delicacy.

Moore had known Davis for nearly 30 years. Her church, Rock Ridge Baptist in Ferrum, made fried apple pies at the Blue Ridge Folklife Festival for two decades. Church members cooked about 2,500 pies at each festival in large skillets atop wood-burning stoves. Festivalgoers lined up for pies all day until the church ran out.

"Those were the longest lines we ever had at the festival," Moore said.

When many of the older church members retired from piemaking, Davis resorted to making hoecakes -- which are basically really big biscuits -- during the festival.

Moore used his pull to get Davis a spot at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in 2007. She gave cooking demonstrations of her signature recipes: baked macaroni and cheese, fried chicken and various cakes and pies.

She gained the attention of Virginia Folklife Program director Jon Lohman, and she earned a spot in the apprenticeship program.

Lohman said that traditional arts, which include local foodways, are what make Virginia different from anywhere else.

"As America becomes more franchised, and you can get the same chicken sandwich in every town from here to Alaska, and as television and a lot of corporate commercial forces start chipping away at local identity, local foods, arts and music become more important," he said. "We need people to carry on these traditions that connect people to a particular place."

Besides, Lohman said, if civilization ever crashed, those skills would not be simple nostalgic traditions, they'd be necessities. The survivors would be those who know how to fend for themselves, grow a garden, hunt for food or how to put up cans of green beans.

"You never know how things are going to go," Lohman said, only half-jokingly. "You might need these [traditions] again. People will need to know how to live, make food and do things. When those computers turn off, we're screwed."

Davis and James will be recognized with other apprenticeship program participants today in Charlottesville. The sisters are making 100 pies for the event.

Even though the two are sisters, Davis said that they probably would not have spent time teaching and learning the art of fried piemaking if not for the program.

"We're all so divided now," Davis said. "We don't come together as families to keep the traditions going. Everybody's got their own home and their own agendas. This has brought us closer."