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A PASSION FOR X-RATED MEAT

JON FASMAN | ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE

mmarchin/flickr

Jon Fasman worries that the day will come when he cuts a thick slice of scrapple to cook for his Sunday breakfast, only to find an angry embedded eyeball staring back at him from the frying pan ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In much the same way that humanity propagates itself, sometimes two columns produce a third. Last week I considered offal; the week before the half-smoke; and together they lead me, of course, to scrapple, that unappreciated, raggedy, gap-toothed, car-on-block denizen of the supermarket meat section.

Scrapple is a breakfast food that consists of meaty pork bones and scraps boiled until the meat falls from the bones. Cornmeal and seasonings are stirred into the meaty soup, and the mixture is left to set into a sort of thick loaf. To eat it, one slices the loaf, dredges the slice in corn meal, fries it, and serves it, usually as a sandwich, or with maple syrup or ketchup. Cooking it requires some skill, or at least some attention: undercooked scrapple has a distinctly slimy quality, while overcooked scrapple tastes like playing cards.

Like the half-smoke, scrapple is a regional delicacy. Having come over with the Pennsylvania Dutch as panhas, a German dish in which buckwheat was simmered in pork stock with scraps of pork and spices, it remains largely unknown outside of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Washington, DC (although two variants exist: in Cincinnati virtually the same dish is known as goetta, and in the southeastern United States it goes by "livermush").

And like any dish named for scraps, it contains offal. Indeed, the ingredients in my supermarket's leading brand of scrapple read as follows: "Pork stock, pork livers, pork fat, pork snouts, corn meal, pork hearts, wheat flour, salt and spices". I found a recipe for scrapple in a cookbook published in 1869 that begins, "Take eight pounds of scraps of pork, that will not do for sausage." Once your meat has descended in size and quality beyond sausage utility, you are at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Sometimes I worry that there will come a day when I cut a thick slice for Sunday breakfast and find an angry embedded eyeball staring back at me from the frying pan.

And yet—here I sense some of you will just have to trust me—scrapple is unquestionably delicious: crusty outside and soft within, soothingly seasoned with that nursery texture of mashed potatoes, it is comfort food at first bite. The ingredient list is alarming, but if you've ever eaten a hot dog, you've probably had worse. It also counts as a form of good stewardship. If we're going to slaughter an animal, we really should use all of it, and since nobody really wants to come to dinner and find a plate of hearts and snouts steaming on the table, scrapple turns those unwieldy bits into positively G-rated form.

Still, scrapple suffers from a branding problem. It might plausibly claim to be a form of pâté (in the same way that a switchblade fight is a form of fencing), even if it sounds more "Deliverance" than "Babette's Feast". But something about its name sticks a little too close to its origins: it serves as a visceral reminder of what we're eating. We refer to "blue" cheese, not "mouldy" cheese; prosciutto is "aged", not "allowed to rot in a controlled manner"; yoghurt cultures are "living", not "teeming and swarming". Scrapple reminds us that however humanely our pork is raised, however caring the farmer, bucolic the setting and rosy the chops, at the end somebody has to eat the scraps.