Scrapple

As tradition built it

Scrapple

Makes 2 loaves. About 2 hours 30 minutes, plus setting overnight.

Ingredients

The stock

• 1 (1.35kg) pork butt, bone in, trimmed of visible fat
• 3.8 litres water
• to taste salt and pepper

The mush

• 2.4 litres the stock
• 1½ tsp dried thyme
• 2 tsp rubbed sage
• 1 tsp ground savory
• ⅛ tsp allspice
• ⅛ tsp nutmeg
• ⅛ tsp cloves
• 720ml cornmeal

To fry and serve

• as needed butter
• to serve ketchup or apple butter

Method

1. Put the pork, water, salt and pepper in a large stockpot. Bring it to the boil, cover, and simmer 2 hours, until tender.
2. Lift out the meat and keep the stock. When it is cool, take the meat off the bone, discard the fat, and chop it fine.
3. Bring 2.4 litres of the stock to the boil with the thyme, sage, savory, allspice, nutmeg and cloves.
4. Add the cornmeal gradually, stirring fast. Turn the heat to medium low and cook 15 minutes, stirring often, until very thick.
5. Stir in the meat and cook 15 minutes more on a low heat. Taste for seasoning.
6. Line two 23 by 13cm loaf tins with waxed paper, pour in the mixture, cover with foil, and chill overnight until solid.
7. Slice it 5mm to 1cm thick and fry in butter in a pan over a medium high heat, browning each side well before turning. Serve with ketchup or apple butter.

Notes

William Woys Weaver's own scholarship is the reason it can be stated here that not every “traditional” scrapple served to tourists is as old as it claims to be, some fried preparations are documented tourist-trade inventions rather than deep community practice, a fact worth knowing.

The recipe is Teri Ranck Foster's, who grew up in Pennsylvania with scrapple. PA Eats describes the older scrapple of offal with cornmeal and buckwheat flour, seasoned with marjoram, sage and thyme; chef Marshall Green, at Cafe Estelle in Philadelphia, simmers head, trotter, shoulder and leg close to five hours, grinds it, and crisps floured slices in steel pans. Neither gives quantities.

What a modern chef changes

A clarified broth carried through the loaf

Cross-refs Rung 05, scrapple's whole-offal rendering

Method

1. Cook the offal and scraps sous vide first, at a precise low temperature over many hours, extracting the same gelatin-rich broth a stovetop simmer gives but without ever risking a scorched pot base or an over-reduced, muddy stock.
2. Set the loaf with a portion of the strained broth passed through a chinois for total clarity before it is folded back into the cornmeal mixture, a cleaner-tasting base than the traditional method, which never separates broth from solids this precisely, ever achieves.
3. Finish the fried slice under the Big Green Egg's direct heat for the final minute rather than in a pan alone, for a genuine char the flat griddle cannot give.