Scrapple--The Way to a Philadelphian’s Heart

“What is scrapple ?” shouted waitress Lynne Brown at the quizzical customer in the Down Home Diner.

“Honey, you’re not from Philly, that’s for sure,” laughed Brown, who promptly explained:

“Scrapple is a Philadelphia dining specialty. It’s a Philadelphia tradition. It’s the leftover scraps of pig, everything but the oink, with cornmeal, buckwheat and spices thrown in. Try it with eggs, you’ll love it.”

Just about every diner, restaurant and cafe serving breakfast in Philadelphia offers scrapple, which comes in precooked loaves, then is sliced and fried. When people order eggs, the waitress asks:

“You want bacon, sausage or scrapple with your eggs?”

Some order their scrapple fried crispy, some fried medium. Some want it soggy. Some smother it with ketchup, some with syrup, others with horseradish, apple sauce or apple butter.

“Everybody from Philly eats scrapple--blacks, whites, Chinese, Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Italians,” said Mario Monzo, chef at the Penrose Diner. “It’s a very popular food.”

Penrose Diner waitress Cathy Blake noted that many eat scrapple for lunch and dinner: “There is an old saying ‘Scrapple, potatoes and vegetables at lunch or supper is real eating.’ ”

It may be the rage of Philadelphia but few outside this city or the surrounding Pennsylvania Dutch country have ever heard of scrapple, let alone tried the tasty dish.

Philadelphia author Kenneth Finkel, who has written several articles about the breakfast specialty, is the city’s scrapple historian. He even lectures about it.

“Scrapple is a metaphor for Philadelphia. It was invented here, going back to the 1680s, to the very beginning of this city. It hasn’t changed. It still has the same ingredients today as it had 300 years ago,” said Finkel, the pied piper of the Philadelphia pate.

Poetry and songs have been written about scrapple. For example this bit of doggerel from William M. Bunn’s “Some After Dinner Speeches” was published in Philadelphia in 1906:

“This world is all a fleeting show,

Since Adam ate the apple,

Its smiles of joy, its tears of woe,

Deceitful shine, deceitful flow--

There’s nothing true but--

Scrapple.”

“Scrapple’s roots go back to medieval times to Holland and North Germany where remnants of butchered pigs were made into a meat pudding. This practice was brought to the New World, especially to Philadelphia,” stated Finkel.

“Once here, the Pennsylvania Dutch went a few steps further. They added cornmeal, buckwheat, sage, cloves and other spices.”

Scrapple is sold in Philadelphia supermarkets, corner grocery stores and butcher shops in 1-, 2-, 5- and 10-pound loaves for about $1.50 a pound. On the counter at Larry Fogarty’s butcher shop in the Terminal Market, a small sign advertising “Hatfield Country Scrapple” lists the product’s ingredients: “Pork stock, pork skin, pork hearts, pork snouts, pork liver, pork tongue, yellow cornmeal, wheat flour, salt, spices.”

Hatfield Quality Meats, one of the biggest meat packers producing scrapple, sells upwards of 50,000 pounds a week and 2.7 million pounds a year, reports Abe Landes, the company’s marketing manager.

“One of the first products Hatfield made in 1895 was scrapple. It is one of the mainstay items that has made the company the success that it has been all these years,” said Landes.

Although a lot of people used to make their own scrapple years ago, very few people do now, Landes noted, “because it is too time consuming a process, too complex a recipe and it has to be made in such big batches. They buy it already made in the scrapple loaves at the marketplace.”

“About the only place you find scrapple on the menu outside Pennsylvania is along the seashore in New Jersey, at Atlantic City, Ocean City and Cape May where Philadelphians vacation in the summer,” Landes continued. “It’s strictly there for the Pennsylvania crowd who demands their scrapple.”

Hatfield and other meat producers ship scrapple to transplanted Pennsylvanians throughout the nation and even overseas. W.C. Fields (who came from Philadelphia) had scrapple shipped to his Hollywood home as long as he lived.

“Philadelphians can’t exist without scrapple,” insisted scrapple historian Finkel.