Freda DeKnight’s Fried Apple Slices – Ebony, 1946 – Black Foodie Finder

Fried Apple Slices With Sausage, From Ebony’s First Food Editor

This is breakfast the way a lot of Southern grandmothers made it: thick apple rings fried in the fat left from the sausage, turned once, and served hot next to the meat. Freda DeKnight ran it in her “Date with a Dish” column in Ebony’s first year, in a page of apple ideas she opened with the line “When the leaves start turning lovely gay colors and the skies have that russet hue, it’s Fall again and Apple Time.”

The recipe is four sentences long and needs nothing but apples, sausage and a skillet. We have kept her words in the clipping above, laid out the steps below, and added our own notes for getting the slices tender inside and browned outside.

Ingredients

• 1 pound country sausage (or ham or bacon)
• 3 or 4 firm apples
• Salt, if needed

Makes: 4 servings (our estimate; the column gives no yield)

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Fry the sausage in a heavy skillet until browned and cooked through. Move it to a dish and keep it warm in a low oven.
2. Core the apples and cut them into slices about ½ inch thick. Leave the peel on.
3. Lay the slices in the hot fat left in the skillet, in a single layer.
4. Sauté until tender and browned, turning once. Figure about 15 minutes in all.
5. Serve the apple slices hot alongside the sausage.

Pro Tips & Suggestions

• Pick apples that hold their shape. Firm, tart-sweet apples such as Honeycrisp, Braeburn, Jonagold or Granny Smith fry up tender without collapsing. Soft eating apples turn to sauce.
• Rings, not wedges. Coring the whole apple and slicing across gives rings that brown evenly and look like the photograph. A ½-inch slice is thick enough to stay juicy.
• Do not crowd the pan. Fry in one layer so the slices brown instead of steaming. Work in two batches if you need to.
• The fat is the seasoning. Sausage drippings carry sage and pepper into the apples. If you use bacon or ham, do the same with their fat.
• Our addition, if you want it sweeter. DeKnight adds nothing to the pan. A pinch of brown sugar and cinnamon in the last two minutes is a common Southern touch, but it is ours, not hers.

About the Creator

Freda DeKnight was the first food editor of Ebony, joining the magazine in its first year. Her column “Date with a Dish” collected recipes from Black home cooks, caterers and chefs across the country at a time when mainstream food pages ignored them. Raised in the Midwest, she worked as a caterer and home economist before Ebony, and she brought a teacher’s clarity to every recipe she printed.

In 1948 she gathered the column into A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes, later reissued as The Ebony Cookbook, one of the first major cookbooks to document Black American cooking region by region. She stayed with Ebony until her death in 1963.

Where to Find This Recipe

This recipe is retyped from “How To Glorify The Apple” by Freda DeKnight, in the “Date with a Dish” column of Ebony, Vol. 1, No. 11 (1946), page 28. The issue can be read in full at the Internet Archive.

The photograph of the finished dish is the one printed directly above the recipe on that page. We show every historical image exactly as it appears in the source.