Like none of you, I am a big fan of scrapple. I love the stuff, and actually find in it a significance not readily apparent even to other scrapple fans, not that there are many of us. You might not even know what scrapple is. So: scrapple is essentially a loaf formed out of pork liver, pork offal, pork broth, and cornmeal. There is little in the way of seasoning, and it has an unappetizing gray color. It tastes mostly of liver. The less you know about its making, the better off you are. I once read a recipe for scrapple that began, "scrub the snout vigorously with a wire brush." When fried up, typically in thickish slices, the center is soft to the point of liquid, and tends to squirt in your mouth when you eat. There is a lot not to like about scrapple.
Nonetheless, I love it. Loving scrapple means loving pork, every bit of it but the squeal. Everybody loves bacon; that doesn't give you lardcore status, not by a long shot. Neither does gobbling down confited pork belly or spare ribs or pulled pork or center cut pork chops. Everybody loves those things. It's how you feel about the offal, the nasty bits, the lard and liver, where you separate the men from the boys. Scrapple is the ultimate statement of pork offal, all of the least-loved body parts mixed together in one delicious block. In that sense, it's the summit or porcine sustainability.
Scrapple is, moreover, a testament to the American past. With all due respect to Jimmy Dean and Bob Evans, behind those well-marketed brand names, they are wholly products of a vast and corrupt trans-national food system, the very antithesis of what we mean by America. Scrapple was brought to us by the Scots-Irish settlers of Appalachia and the German settlers of Pennsylvania, the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (this last a corruption of "deutch."), and has changed little along the way. These people raised pigs, because they often didn't have land. Pigs go off into the woods and feed themselves and then come back to get bumped off. It is the best of all poor people's meat. It serves people well who don't have refrigeration; like its equally ancient cousin, sausage, it's a way to eat all the pork that can't be dried and cured. Unlike sausage, it remains a regional treat. I can barely ever find it here in New York.
But it's as a cook that I love scrapple best. The crudest of all pork products, it requires the most from it's cook. If you slice it too thin, it burns up. If you cut it too thick, it gets the revolting puddinglike center described above. Scrapple, thanks to the primordial soup from which it is formed, has a lot of water in it. So you need to press it while it sizzles in its cast-iron pan. (Because its preparation is unimaginable in any other vessel.) You have to keep it at a perfectly medium-low heat, and you have to press it as it cooks, releasing the steam and concentrating both its flavor and its crunch. Once cooked it can be eaten solo, right out of the pan. Or it can be pressed in a sandwich of untoasted white bread, a plane of pure pork crunch inside a cloud. It can be itself the outer layers of a sandwich of fried eggs and provolone cheese, or a thick slice of cold onion. It doesn't keep, and it's not suitable for sharing. You can only make a little at a time. Which is something else old-school about scrapple. It doesn't lend itself to mass production.
One last virtue of this despised and forgotten meat: it is mostly produced by a handful of independent pork companies, such as Hatfield and Habbersett, the latter of whom makes what is in my opinion the best in the country. It is below the notice of even the most cynical and profit-conscious of pork conglomerates.
There is just so much to love about scrapple. In fact, I am going to go pay tribute to it right now. My knife is ready and my black iron pan is hot. It's ready for me, and I am ready for it. Are you?
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xaimnWWUp7avt46aaXFsYGx8uLTYZqqcqpGlva2xjKaYrayVp8Bw