Scrapple

The glorious world of Pennsylvanian breakfast meats

A store cooler filled with scrapple and liver mush in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

Today’s short newsletter was prompted by Kavita Favelle’s retweeting of this article about scrapple by Kae Lani Palmisano. A popular regional speciality in Pennsylvania, scrapple has an impeccable nose-to-tail pedigree. Made from pork offcuts (including offal) after farmers and homesteaders butchered their pigs, the inclusion of flour (or cornmeal) and seasonings made the meat go even further. Fashioned into a loaf, sliced and fried to give it a crispy crust, scrapple becomes incredibly versatile. Serve it with fried apples (‘Scrapple ‘n Apple’, how could you not?!), eggs, home fries or breakfast potatoes, stuff slices into bread rolls with mustard and salad for lunch or add cubes of freshly fried scapple to breakfast stratas or omelettes. It isn’t hard to make from scratch either and will feel very familiar to anyone who has eaten black pudding (although scrapple is not made with pig’s blood), haslet, frikadellen, and all manner of boudins.

I have drinks writer Matthew Rowley to thank for the glorious book recommendation pictured below. Its author, William Woys Weaver, is a remarkable food ethnographer and expert on Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, of which scrapple is just one part of a fascinating and influential whole. Woys Weaver’s book is also filled with glorious words and phrases like 'mundle', 'poor-do', 'scrabblin mush', and 'warschthorn' ('sausage horn)' which makes me love it all the more. There are two pages on haslet and an EIGHTEEN PAGE bibliography which makes his book God-tier book in my opinion Oh, and there’s a recipe for clam scrapple fgs 🐽

How to make scrapple: a recipe from Grit

Scrapple: Flower of Flavours from the Pennsylvanian-Dutch at Home Companion.

An excellent primer on scrapple and its relatives from Salute The Pig’s Chris Bülow.

EDIT: after publishing this post, a guy called Bobby Hughes (Head Basketball Coach at Rosemont College) tweeted me a link to a film called ‘Scrapple Road’. It is available for streaming on Vimeo here for £4.36.