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Philadelphia Scrapple
Take a cleaned pig's head, put in a kettle, cover with boiling water and simmer slowly until the meat falls from the bones. Remove skin and bones and chop the meat fine. Put the pot liquor in a cold place until next day; then remove the cake of fat which has formed over the top. Strain the liquor and return to the fire.
When it boils, stir in the chopped meat and add a very high seasoning of salt and pepper. Sift in, slowly, fine corn-meal, adding it gradually until sufficiently thick to mold firmly when cold.
Continue to stir for twenty minutes; then draw to one side, where it will bubble occasionally, and cook for an hour longer. Pour into wetted pans and set away until cold; then turn out on a platter and keep in a cold place. In winter this will keep for a fortnight or longer, according to the severity of the weather.
A whole-head scrapple with no fixed quantities: the meat and the strained broth set the proportions, and the cornmeal is added by feel. The one thing to get right is the consistency test before the long cook.
- Test the thickness before the hour of cookingOnce the cornmeal is in, drop a spoonful onto a cold plate and let it cool a minute. It should hold its shape and not weep liquid; if it slumps, sift in more meal. Too thin and the loaf will never slice, and adding meal at the end leaves it raw-tasting.
- Sourcing the headA cleaned pig's head is an order-ahead item from a butcher, not a supermarket purchase. Ask for it split, with the brain and eyes removed and the ears and snout left on; a split head fits an 8-quart pot, a whole one usually does not. Two to three pounds of picked meat and about 2 quarts of broth is a reasonable expectation from a 10-12 lb head, which will make roughly two standard loaf pans.
- SubstitutingPork shoulder plus a pound or two of trotters gives similar results in a modern kitchen: the trotters supply the gelatin that makes the loaf sliceable. Skin-and-bone-in cuts matter more here than the specific cut.
- Simmer, do not boil"Simmer slowly" means bare movement at the surface for 3 to 4 hours. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat into the broth, and the point of chilling overnight is to lift that fat off as a clean cake.
- Corn-meal"Fine corn-meal" is fine yellow or white cornmeal, not the coarse polenta grind and not self-rising. Rain it in through a sieve with the broth at a low boil and stir constantly, or it will lump.
- The long cookAfter twenty minutes of stirring, the hour at a bare bubble is what cooks the starch through and drives off raw corn flavor. Use a heavy pot and a flat wooden spoon; the mush scorches on the bottom easily. A heat diffuser helps on a modern burner.
- High seasoningThe original is right to insist on it. Cold starch mutes salt and pepper badly, so season the hot mush until it tastes slightly aggressive. Traditional Pennsylvania additions are sage, marjoram, thyme, and often a little ground coriander or mace.
- Wetted pans, and slicingRinsing the pans with cold water is the release agent; plastic wrap or a parchment sling works better. Chill at least 8 hours, unmold, and cut into slices about 3/8 inch thick. Thinner slices break apart in the pan; fry in a little lard or oil, without turning, until a hard crust forms.
- StorageDisregard the fortnight. That assumed an unheated winter larder near freezing. Keep it wrapped in the refrigerator up to 4 days, or slice, layer with parchment, and freeze up to 3 months; fry from frozen over lower heat.
Scrapple is the Pennsylvania German panhaas, a name usually glossed as "pan rabbit" — a mush of pork scraps and grain set into a loaf and fried, and it belongs to a wide European family of such dishes that includes Rhineland Panhas and British white pudding. The head, the least saleable part of a hog, plus a cheap grain, yields a fortnight of breakfasts. Cornmeal here stands in for the buckwheat or rye of the Old World versions, a substitution generally traced to what was abundant in southeastern Pennsylvania. The recipe's assumption that a cook has a whole pig's head, a cold larder, and a free hour to stand at the stove marks it as pre-refrigeration home butchering, when hogs were killed in cold weather and everything had to be used at once.