Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Recipe for Scrapple

Since Anne Higginson Spicer's poem in the previous post mentioned recipes for scrapple, I thought I would provide a recipe for scrapple. This one is from The Farm Journal for November 1914, which would have been broadly in the vicinity of when Spicer was writing; the article is "Meat for the Family: Time to Get Busy", and it discusses cured hams, panhas, and scrapple.

SCRAPPLE

There seems to be little difference between panhas and the favorite Pennsylvania Dutch dish, known by us as scrapple, and liked by most people. This is made of the waste pieces of meat, the trimmings of the hams and shoulders, the head, the heart, a small piece of the liver, and the skins from the lard and the sausage meat. The ears, carefully cleaned and the cartilage removed, may be used. The head is split between the jaws, and after the tongue is taken out is split the other way. Cut off the snout, remove the jaw and nasal cavities. Put the head meat and skins into the boiler with water to cover them, the rest of the meat fifteen minutes later. Boil until the meat leaves the bones, then chop it fine, strain the liquor and add to it enough water to make five parts liquid to three of meat. Set the liquid to boiling, stirring in corn-meal to make a moderately thick mush, and stirring all the time. Then put in the meat, mixing thoroughly, and season to taste with salt, black and red pepper, and either sage, sweet marjoram, thyme or pennyroyal, whichever flavor you prefer. The corn-meal should be fine, made of new corn, well dried before grinding, and there should be about as much of it as of the meat. Put the scrapple away in pans in a cold place. To cook, cut into slices, lay in a very hot pan and fry quickly till brown.