If you’ve ever spent time in the Mid-Atlantic, it’s entirely possible you’ve seen scrapple. It vaguely resembles Depression-era meatloaf, though it holds its square shape much more easily. Plus, a few bites will quickly tell you that scrapple is pork, not beef, and that it tastes closer to liverwurst or even breakfast sausage, depending on how it’s spiced (usually with salt, pepper, and sage). In essence, scrapple is a thick, mushy food made from pork scraps (including edible organ meat), cornmeal, and often buckwheat flour. It’s almost a pâté, though perhaps closer to polenta in some ways.
Scrapple dates back a few hundred years to the Pennsylvania Dutch, the group of German-speaking settlers who arrived in the region back in the 1600s. Since then, the dish has spread outside the Mid-Atlantic, and it shares similarities with livermush and liver pudding in the American South. Back then, the point of scrapple was to work with whatever parts of the pig you could to avoid wasting anything. Similarly, modern scrapple uses different cuts and trimmings of pork and often organs like liver, which are ground up and cooked with the cornmeal and buckwheat. Many would-be scrapple fans are turned off by the mystery meat nature of scrapple. But it’s no different from not really knowing what’s in your hot dogs. If you enjoy those, there’s no reason a loaf of scrapple shouldn’t catch your eye.
You can make scrapple at home or buy it from the store
Scrapple is available in grocery stores in areas where it’s popular. But you can also make it yourself. Don’t worry too much about what parts of the pig to use. If it can be cooked and eaten, you can put it into scrapple. Just leave out the parts you don’t care for. If you really want to, you can use nothing but pork shoulder for the meat. The pork parts are usually simmered at the beginning and then ground up and spiced.
You use the stock from cooking the pork to cook the cornmeal and buckwheat before mixing it all together. Then it just goes into a loaf pan and into the refrigerator. When you’re ready to eat it, just slice off a slab and pan-fry it.
Scrapple is more versatile than it may look. It can go into lunch sandwiches like a patty or served with breakfast. The latter is more common, and it helps to think of scrapple as a breakfast sausage. Just top it with a fried egg, serve it alongside basic buttermilk pancakes, or combine pieces of scrapple and grated cheese as additions to give waffles a savory twist. If you’re just hungry and want a quick breakfast, some people just drizzle maple syrup or ketchup over it and eat it with a fork.
