Extra Ordinary Food: Scrapple is more than a meatloaf

The first mention I ever heard of scrapple was when I was reading a 19th century cookbook. It had other fun recipes like Turtle Soup and “how to get the fish smell off a knife.” Good stuff.

Scrapple is a breakfast staple from the middle of our East coast, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. The “Pennsylvania Dutch” communities from Germany brought the recipe with them when they emigrated to the American Colonies. The Pennsylvania Dutch are mostly German descended Amish and Mennonites. “Dutch” in this sense is a variation on Deutsch, which is what the Germans call themselves.

These days you can find scrapple at restaurants up and down the Eastern Seaboard, but it's becoming more and more popular at hip breakfast establishments, particularly around the Appalachian Mountains, as people try to dig into their regional roots and find American traditions to carry on and play with.

Scrapple is essentially a breakfast meatloaf made of pork scraps, herbs and spices that is bound with cornmeal and/or buckwheat flour. So it's more or less meatloaf glued together with polenta. Cook it, let it set up as a loaf, then slice it up and fry it in a pan.

It was originally made with whatever leftover scraps you can get, like the little bit ends of chops that won't make a proper cut and organ meats like liver. All those scraps can be hard to get a hold of these days, unless you're butchering and dressing a whole hog. The good scraps go into sausages, and the offal tends to end up in pet food. For this recipe, I used bone-in pork shoulder and unsmoked ham hocks. The ham hocks have a nice big bone in them, and I wanted the gelatin from the bone and cartilage to help bind and thicken the finished loaf. Neck bones work really well also, in place of the ham hocks.

The process is fairly simple. Simmer the meat for a couple hours, with just enough liquid to cover it. Strain the liquid off, and use that to make polenta. Pull the meat off the bones, get rid of the gristle, and chop it up into small pieces. Mix it all together, put it in a loaf pan, then chill it till it's solid.

Since this is a classic American recipe, that is the springboard that everyone jumps off before putting their own personal twists and turns on it. So when you want to go extra on it, there are a whole lot of things you can play with. A pinch of spices, like nutmeg, allspice, coriander seed or caraway can be fun. Fresh herbs like thyme, sage, savory or rosemary work well in there. Some folks use only cornmeal, some folks only buckwheat, some add wheat flour into the porridge binder.

Personally, I like using cornmeal with a little buckwheat for flavor, and I like using cider instead of water when cooking the meat. Apples and pork are always a good combination, and the acidity of hard cider helps pull nutrients and gelatin out of the bones and marrow, which helps the finished Scrapple hold together after it's set up.

When you're cooking the meat, there are a couple extra steps that I feel will help enormously, without requiring too much extra work.

To get some brown color on the meat and garlic, I like to fry the meat in a little butter before covering it with liquid to stew. Just lazily fry the meat in cast iron, turning occasionally until it's brown. Then add the garlic to the rendered fat until it browns before adding the cider or water. This will soften up the bite of the garlic a little, and generally deepen the flavor of the pork. Color is flavor.

Putting salt in with the meat while it's cooking also is very helpful. The salt helps breakdown some of the tougher bits. In this recipe, I calculated the salt amount for the finished loaf and included all of it in with the meat, right at the beginning. Scrapple wants to be mostly uniform in texture like a pate, so don't be worried about overcooking it and having the meat lose it's texture. If the meat seems a little salty right when it comes out of the pot, don't worry about that. It will settle down and balance out when the starchy cornmeal and buckwheat get added to it later.

The other trick is to make your polenta over a double boiler. The cornmeal wants to get cooked down until it loses it's toothy grit. We want it to be real smooth, like Al Green. The problem with this is that a cornmeal mush takes 20 or 30 minutes to get to that point at a simmer. It wants to scorch on the bottom of the pan, so it needs to be stirred constantly like risotto.

But the real problem is that cooking cornmeal this way is dangerous. It will bubble up from the bottom and pop! Spraying hot, sticky corn mush all over the kitchen. It will stick to you and burn like culinary napalm. We don't want that. Hard no on that.

The easy solution is to cook it over a “double boiler” with a cover on it. A double boiler is a bowl that fits snugly over a pot of boiling water. Boiling water is never going to get hotter that 212 degrees, so there are less worries about scorching and explosive burps. The drawback is that it takes an hour and a half to cook, instead of 30 minutes. The plus side is that you can do a lot of other things in the meantime, when you are not hovering over a dangerously hot and volatile gloop. In fact, you have plenty of time to pick the meat apart and chop it up to add in once the polenta is almost done.

Once the polenta part is cooked through, add the meat back to it, along with any fresh herbs you want to use. Let it all cook together for another 15 minutes. Check the seasoning, add more salt and pepper if you like. Then put it in your loaf pan, and chill it in the fridge. It will take a few hours to set up. I usually make it at night for the next day’s breakfast, and then I have plenty to spare for the rest of the week.

When it's set up and you are ready to eat, pull it out of the loaf and cut half to one inch slices off it. Dust the cut edges with regular flour. Heat up some butter in a cast iron pan and fry it on both sides until it's brown, crispy, and warm in the middle. Word to the wise?: don't flip it until it's well browned. That brown crust really helps hold it together. If you flip it too early, it might crumble apart and turn to mush on you. It will still taste amazing, but it won't have quite the same impressive texture and presentation on the plate.

Scrapple is usually eaten as a breakfast side. It's both the meat and the starch. Serve it with a couple eggs, maybe some baked apples. It's typically topped with ketchup or maple syrup. But hey, you do you. Most importantly, enjoy your slice of American history.

Chef Tibbs, also known as Joshua “Tibbs” Tibbetts, is a Cedar Rapids native who has been a professional chef for more than 30 years.