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PHILADELPHIA SCRAPPLE
Mix potatoes (or any cold vegetables) and meat, turn into a skillet with meat gravy from previous day. Stir up until dry and crisp, resembling a very dry hash; serve in small deep dish.
A leftovers dish from the book's Fragments chapter, written for a cook who already has cold boiled potatoes and yesterday's gravy on hand. Nearly everything is left to judgment, so the notes below fill in the proportions and the one step that decides whether it comes out crisp or pasty.
- It is not scrappleDespite the name, this has no cornmeal and no pork trimmings simmered to mush. It is a bound hash of cold meat and vegetables, closer to what other books of the period call a rechauffe. If you came looking for the sliced-and-fried Pennsylvania Dutch loaf, this is not that recipe.
- ProportionsWork to roughly two parts chopped cold potato or vegetable to one part chopped cooked meat, with about a quarter cup of gravy per two cups of solids. The gravy is a binder only; too much and the mixture steams instead of frying.
- The hinge: leave it alone"Stir up until dry and crisp" can be read as constant stirring; if you want a browned crust rather than a merely dry scramble, spread the mixture, let it sit over medium heat for several minutes until the bottom browns, then turn it in sections.
- The skilletCast iron or another heavy pan, well greased with butter, bacon fat or beef drippings. Chilled gravy is sticky and will catch on a thin or bare pan.
- Cold gravy will be solidGravy set overnight in a cold larder comes out of the bowl in a block. Warm it slightly, or cut it into the hash in small pieces and let the pan's heat loosen it, rather than adding water.
- Reheating leftoversCooked meat that has been held a day should be brought right through to steaming hot, 165F at the center of the mass, not merely browned on the outside. Chop the meat small so the heat reaches it in the time the crust takes to form.
- SeasoningThe original assumes the gravy carries the salt, which it may not. Taste before serving and add salt, pepper, and a little chopped onion or parsley fried in the fat first if the mixture seems flat.
- YieldTwo cups of solids will roughly fill a 9-inch skillet and serve two at breakfast. The original says only "small deep dish"; a warmed dish helps, as the hash cools fast once it leaves the pan.
The Fragments chapter of Buckeye Cookery is a catalogue of what to do with the previous day's dinner, and the borrowed name here says more about the compilers' habits than about Philadelphia. True scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch preparation, usually traced to German panhaas, in which the scraps and broth left from butchering a hog are thickened with cornmeal, poured into loaf pans to set, then sliced and fried; the word is generally explained as a diminutive of "scrap." Whatever the compilers meant by the title, this recipe keeps nothing of that beyond the sense of using up odds and ends, and it belongs to a kitchen in which gravy was not thrown away.