Every year around this time, something starts happening to people who grew up in Dallas. They smell a deep fryer that isn’t there yet, or they catch themselves thinking about mustard, and they realize the State Fair is close. A lot of that feeling traces back to one family and one stick of fried dough at Fletcher’s, and the Fair opens next Friday, September 25, so this is as good a week as any to tell the whole story.
It starts in 1938, with two brothers who weren’t cooks at all. Neil and Carl Fletcher were vaudeville performers, sixth-generation showmen who’d spent years touring with a family act called the Madcap Players and performing at Fair Park itself in a show called “The Drunkard.” As that career wound down, fair officials offered them a food booth. Neil later told the Dallas Morning News how the idea came together: “We said, ‘Sure.’ Then, over a bottle of bourbon, we tried to figure out what we could sell there.”
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