Scrapple, for ye uninitiated, is simply a meat pudding: a rich pork broth, thickened with cornmeal and seasoned with herbs, spices, and scraps of meat too small for other uses. It came from old Germany, where it was made from rabbit carcasses and thickened with buckwheat or spelt flour — hence the German name panhaas, which means, literally, “pan rabbit.” In Pennsylvania the Germans used what they had available to them, namely pork and cornmeal, and panhaas evolved into a way to salvage the last bits of the pig at late-fall butchering time. Molded into crocks, sealed with rendered lard, and stored in a cellar, the pudding kept all winter. City butchers learned the dish from their German neighbors, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, panhaas was becoming known outside the region as “Philadelphia scrapple.”

The debate over which version was better raged for more than a century. A city businessman named Joseph Hildreth claimed in the 1940s that panhaas was bland stuff, and that Philadelphia butchers had improved it by adding spices and meat scraps. But a fellow by the name of Bland Johaneson spoke up for the old-timers:

Scrapple, a butchering-time corruption of “scraps,” has been appropriated by Philadelphia, and labelled Philadelphia scrapple. What a lean corn-mealy, pepperless slab of melancholy mush masquerades under that name! And how it cries out for ketchup, Worcestershire sauce or whatever palate-jogger you will. Scrapple in Berks County is luscious, dark, and as dignified as black walnuts. It groans for no alien condiment or foreign frying fat. It fries itself, and the seasoning was done by an artist when it was made. Bland Johaneson, “Victualry Among the Pennsylvania Germans,” in The American Mercury, October 1926, pp. 196–198.

Nor was scrapple the only Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy to walk, as I once said, the “fine line between delicacy and disgust.” (I offer the usual apologies for quoting myself.) How about souse? If you’re thinking “head cheese” and gagging quietly into your keyboard, read James Michener’s depiction of the Mennonite butcher Levi Zendt at work:

Extracting stock from the bubbling kettle [of hogs' feet, lean pork, and tongue], he poured it into a large crock to which he added twelve cups of the sourest cider vinegar the area could provide. “That’ll make ‘em pucker,” he said. He then added twelve tablespoons of salt to give the souse a bite, three teaspoons of pepper to make it snap, and a handful of cloves and cinnamon bark to make it sweet. He placed the crock on the back of the stove, keeping it warm rather than hot. Twice he tasted it, smacking his lips over the acrid bite the vinegar and salt imparted, but he crushed two more cloves to give it better balance.

He now laid out twelve souse pans and placed in each of them round disks of the sourest Lancaster pickles and here and there a single small slice of pickled carrot. Then like an artist he adjusted various items to produce a more pleasing design.

After a few minutes he took the kettle of bubbling meat from the fire and with tongs began fishing out the larger pieces of meat, arranging them among the pickles and carrots in the bottom of the pans. It was here that Zendt souse achieved its visual distinction, because the meat came in two colors, white chunks from the fatty parts, red meat from the lean; he kept the two in balance… James Michener, Centennial (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 304–305.

You get the idea. And my mouth is watering.

Here’s what I wrote elsewhere about the debate over country and city scrapple:

In part these claims are simply patriotic posturing, but the debate over the true nature of scrapple reveals the different ways “country” food – and by extension all of rural culture — is characterized. On the one hand, country cooking is primitive, bland, heavy, uncreative; on the other, it is rich, pure, homey, full of simple goodness…. Everyone agreed that scrapple was proof of Pennsylvania Dutch frugality… Dutch cooking was also democratic and unpretentious; food writer Archie Robertson commented that scrapple shows Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine to be “completely without class consciousness.” In the city, however, frugal became cheap and egalitarian became poor man’s food, what mothers served their children for breakfast because they could afford no better. Garden Spot, p. 119–120.

The debate no longer rages over scrapple, because nobody makes their own scrapple any more. (Well: except me, on occasion, and I have to buy neck bones to do it, which is hardly sporting.) What you can find is all nasty poor man’s industrial stuff; the country butchers have consolidated, and they’re doing things pretty much the way the city butchers always did. Instead the debate rages over hamburgers — and the arguments about frugality and egalitarianism have been flipped. Old-fashioned frugality is invoked to justify mechanical deboning of animal carcasses and the purveyance of “pink slime,” as is the high cost of food: poor people, it’s charged, have to eat. And what’s more egalitarian than a burger? If, on the other hand, I say that I’m going to buy a hunk of beef and grind it myself so that I know what I’m eating, I come off as an elitist. And to some extent I am; it’s hardly frugal to buy grass-fed chuck to grind for burgers a Boston butt to make homemade sausage. I’m hardly communing with the great democratic masses, hardly partaking of the daily bread of America. Food production has become so thoroughly industrialized that only a factory can claim the mantle of old-fashioned frugality, because the rest of us are buying retail. In the mid-twentieth century it was possible to claim the virtue of the old ways, because the old ways still existed; now those of us who try to re-create them are culinary tourists, foodies, pretenders.

I still, as I said, want the whole scrapple. The stuff in the meat case at the supermarket ain’t it: that’s a cheap plastic replica. But neither, exactly, is my homemade version made from neck bones, even if I buy them from the farmers’ market; it is, instead, a museum object, preserved for study. The culture that created it is gone, and I’m doing nothing to revive it; in its own way it’s as dead a thing as a frozen meat patty.

The solution, clearly, is to start raising my own hogs. In the meantime, I’m going to see if the guy at the farmers’ market has any pork tongue. You can eat pretty well in a lot of these museums nowadays.

But I get tired of reading only people I agree with, so I went looking for contrary arguments. And I ran across the website of Maureen Ogle, who is writing a book about, I gather, the history of Americans’ relationship with meat. Not surprisingly, she offers a bit of historical perspective on the matter.

In the 1970s, Ogle observes, when meat prices soared,¹ consumers complained, and processors looking for ways to save money got approval from the USDA to mechanically debone beef carcasses to salvage every available scrap of meat. Later, after outbreaks of E. coli, processors began treating the scraps with ammonium hydroxide to sanitize them.

Pink slime, she argues, is the logical outcome of Americans’ insistence on eating as much meat as possible and, at the same time, on paying as little as possible for it. I certainly don’t argue with that. Nor will I waste much time arguing that pink slime is not, in fact, beef; there’s no point debating semantics. Whether it is safe for human consumption is an open question, but I don’t see much evidence that it’s any less safe than anything else coming out of Big Food these days. And I have to agree that most of the reaction to it is irrational: as I’ve said before, “It’s gross” is not an argument. I would add, finally, that I’m not happy about the waste of meat if the scraps formerly in pink slime are to be discarded, particularly if I believe the beef industry’s claim that 1.5 million head of cattle will be needed to make up the difference.²

Where I lost sympathy for Ogle’s tough stand for reason and accuracy, though, was when she observed that “The real problem… is that many food activists simply don’t understand how meat is manufactured.” On the contrary, I believe food activists understand very well how meat is manufactured: the problem is that meat isn’t supposed to be manufactured at all. To use that term accepts the severance of what we’re putting in our bodies from any biological origins — a fundamental fact of nearly all food in the United States of America, 2012, but a fact that I don’t accept as right, good, or justifiable. I believe that, deep down, most Americans don’t fundamentally accept that fact either: they merely ignore it until reports of pink slime force them to face it. And then they lash out — not at the root problem, but at whatever forced them to face up to unpleasant realities. They shoot the messenger.

The people shooting the messenger are wrong, at least on one level, and they’re behaving irrationally. But that doesn’t make the problem any less real. The problem is simply that meat is manufactured, which is precisely why most people don’t know, don’t understand, and don’t want to know or to understand what’s in the stuff they’re shoving down their gullets. The root of the mess that is our current “food system” is the lack of knowledge — not of the knowledge that Ogle is talking about, but of meaningful, intimate and personal knowledge.

In a related post, Ogle compares mechanical deboning to the sorts of ways people formerly used up every scrap of meat on a carcass, like making soup, and suggests that they’re essentially the same. But that’s facile. There’s a significant difference between, on the one hand, carefully simmering down bones to free meat and dissolve cartilage into stock, combining them, seasoning them, and shaping them into a loaf; and on the other hand, scraping off the cartilage and grinding it up as filler, chemically sanitizing it to cover the errors of farm and factory and kitchen and boosting its wan flavor with additional isolated chemicals. Whether there is or is not a significant difference nutritionally is not a question I’m interested in; neither my food nor myself is merely a sum over chemicals. The meal as a whole is different. The one springs from biological processes and is deeply embedded in cultural practices; the other is the product of a mechanical process, designed to be eaten mechanically.

The one is, in short, known intimately; the other is known analytically — a distinction I could make in, for example, Spanish (conocer, to know personally, versus saber, to know of or to know that) but not easily in English. If I raise and kill a pig and make scrapple, I know both the pig and the scrapple in much the same way that I know my sister. (No offense to my sister; it’s meant as a complement to the pig.³) If I buy a frozen hamburger patty (or scrapple, for that matter) from the supermarket, I’m buying a product whose ingredients and “nutrition facts” I can list but of whose origins and nature I know nothing. The steer has been treated as a machine, the food is “manufactured,” and I, ultimately, have accepted my own role as a machine.

That difference between “pink slime” and what most people would consider beef cannot, in the end, be analyzed by breaking down each into its component parts and comparing them, because that sort of analysis is precisely the problem. Reducing our food, and ourselves, to a collection of analyzable chemicals created the possibility and indeed the inevitability of pink slime; that we are more than collections of chemicals is a fact that must be grasped intuitively. Reason, of the reductive scientific sort that Ogle takes as her battle cry against “scolds,” cannot entirely be the solution to the problem of the food system, because that sort of reason created the problem in the first place: it permits only one kind of knowledge, when what’s missing is another. But certainly irrational fearmongering and finger-pointing isn’t the answer, either. Let me propose a different way of thinking about the matter, which is not a new one but, in fact, a very old one.

In his essay “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” Allen Tate has some choice observations on the dangers of abstraction. The metaphor he uses is that of a horse:

Religion, when it directs its attention to the horse cropping the blue-grass on the lawn, is concerned with the whole horse, and not with (1) that part of him which he has in common with other horses, or that more general part which he shares with other quadrupeds or with the more general vertebrates; and not with (2) that power of the horse which he shares with horsepower in general, of pushing or pulling another object. Religion pretends to place before us the horse as he is. Allen Tate, “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” in I’ll Take My Stand (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1977 [1930]), 155–175. (Quotation from pp. 156–7.)

This, Tate argues, is the value of religion: that it asks us to see the horse neither as a member of an abstract set, nor as the sum of its practical value to us, but as the whole that it is. The modern scientific mind denies that such a horse exists: yet, he insists, “there is a complete and self-contained horse in spite of the now prevailing faith that there is none simply because the abstract and scientific modern mind cannot see him.”

This modern mind sees only half the horse — that half which may become a dynamo, or an automobile, or any other horsepowered machine. If this mind had much respect for the full-dimensioned, grass-eating horse, it would never have invented the engine which represents only half of him. The religious mind, on the other hand, has this respect; it wants the whole horse, and it will be satisfied with nothing less. Ibid., p. 157.

Whether it requires a religious mind to see the whole horse is a question I won’t try to address here, and Tate himself observes that modern religion isn’t much help in that regard, anyway. I could as easily call it a humanistic mind — the sort of mind that studying the humanities ought to cultivate. Regardless, I will insist, á la Tate, that there is such a thing as “the whole scrapple,” ostensibly contradictory though that phrase may be, that I want the whole scrapple and will be satisfied with nothing less — and that if the modern, scientific mind had much respect for scrapple, for sausage, for soup and stew, it wouldn’t have invented pink slime.

Anybody who insists that the two are equivalent, or that there’s no such thing as “the whole scrapple,” is welcome to stop by my house for a bite of the chicken pie I made for dinner tonight from the scraps and simmered carcass of a roast chicken. Or you can have a frozen hamburger patty from the supermarket. Your choice.

From goober peas to liberty meat: Peanuts in American culture and cuisine

Since the nineteenth century peanuts have been hailed as a boon to farmers, nutrition for kids, a vegetarian’s staple, protein for the poor, a patriotic answer to wartime shortages — yet we eat them mostly as peanut butter sandwiches and Snickers bars. Join historian Dr. David Walbert for this “History Bites” talk to learn about the strange history of this native legume and sample treats from earlier eras.

You can read my response over at The New Agrarian.

I offer the chart with a few caveats. First, I had data for only thirteen months (January 2011 through January 2012). My intent is to update it periodically as I have time, but be aware that it reflects a single year and doesn’t show the inevitable variability from one growing season to the next.

Second, my data came mainly from farmers’ self-reporting. While I don’t believe that led to any serious inaccuracies, it did create some inconsistencies that I did my best to reconcile. For example, some people listed tatsoi, bok choy, and mizuna separately, while others lumped them under the heading of “Asian greens.” Then again, I don’t expect that Jefferson’s data was necessarily any more reliable: it still gives a good snapshot.

Third, I omitted items that didn’t seem to have a “season” as such (that appeared only for a single week), and when something went missing for a week in the middle of a season, I assumed it to be a fluke. Both sorts of blips would be smoothed out if I were looking at multiple years.

Just five years ago, this table would have been far shorter, and its length is a credit to the amazing community of farmers we have in the Piedmont. Unfortunately, it also makes the chart a little tough to read, since you quickly scroll past the header with the months. If you mouse over the name of each produce item, you’ll see the dates for its availability, and when I have time, I want to find a way to fix that header in place.

Olsen wandered into my office this afternoon, during that long lull between the renewal of lunch and the renewal of evening, the dreary middle age of the day, the two and three o’clocks when time grows soggy with use and sags like paunch, or laundry. Olsen, too, appeared a little soggy, and not only from the rain. He hoped tacitly if no less openly for another drink, glancing repeatedly at the drawer where he believes I keep my flask. I pretended not to notice nor to understand, for a ream of essays awaited his departure, and however their grim prospect might tempt even Carrie Nation to the solace of a still, no liquor can dull the pain of their tumid ungrammatical prose. Seventeen vapid analyses of the Aeneid will all too easily elicit tears without the loosening effect of whiskey, and I feel that one of us, at least, ought to approach the project in a mood of sobriety.

Olsen puddled in my chair for a good hour, or rather a poor one, failing insistently to engage me in talk of politics. Will the crackers (he so eloquently demanded) support Smith¹, or will their faith in the party of Jefferson flag when its standard is borne by a Catholic? He, like the day, had fallen into that vale between the sobriety of morning and the convivial drunkenness of evening, able neither to reason purely nor let the matter rest, and though there seemed no safe answer to his question, as often as I demurred he pressed me. My inherited Republicanism is a topic best kept quiet in this parts, and I admit I prefer not to examine it too closely myself. Politics is too much the spittle on Olsen’s lip and the gilded excretion of undergraduate pens, too little the poetry and reason to which it pretends. I should rather abstain from those arts to which the Greeks assigned no Muse.

Olsen knows no such scruples. By the time I secured his departure the clock lurched uncharitably towards four, and Aeneas and the muse of bunkum still demanded my attention, of which I could muster far too little. I had hopes of an early dinner and Bromfield² in the bath, but my day was denied Seneca’s calm end³ and died, instead, on the muddy field of education, where I fought the enemy only to a draw. Three essays yet await the dawn, which will arrive, as it so often does, far too early.

Clementine Paddleford was one of the pioneers of modern food writing: as the late New York Times editor R. W. Apple, Jr., described her, “the Nellie Bly of culinary journalism, a go-anywhere, taste-anything, ask-everything kind of reporter who traveled more than 50,000 miles a year in search of stories in a day when very few food editors strayed far from their desks.” R. W. Apple, Jr., “A Life in the Culinary Front Lines, New York Times, Nov. 30, 2005. But not so much a check-your-facts kind of reporter, at least not when it came to history. (In that she was rather less unique among food writers.) Here she is in 1947, in her Washington’s birthday column in the New York Herald Tribune:

The Colonial fathers had a sweet tooth. The Colonial mothers kept the tooth well stuffed. The devised devastating dainties in a way the gentlemen liked. They concocted the most palate titivating [sic] desserts their early day larders could provide. Home born, these delicacies. Every woman’s recipe was her own dear secret; carefully guarded and set down in her best penmanship in a sturdy little book made to last the years. Clementine Paddleford, “Recipes of Washington’s Mother Still Popular,” New York Herald Tribune, February 21, 1947.

Ah, yes: the warmup to a claim of authenticity! We must have authenticity. She continues:

Martha Washington invented George Washington pie. The story is that Martha, desiring a pie to take the place of mince, yet one to prepare quickly, gave orders to her cook to make a pie with thin layers of cake and a filling of jam. The creation was served when President Thomas Jefferson was an honored guest.

How sweet! Figuratively, I mean. Except that dear old George had passed on before Jefferson became president, and Martha followed about a year after Tom’s inauguration. It’s not completely impossible, but Washington Pie is almost certainly a nineteenth-century invention, as was Washington Cake, both named in honor of the Father of Our Country but in no way based on any of his wife’s recipes. From a quick search of Google Books one can find recipes for Washington Pie as early as the 1850s, dozens of them in the decades that followed, but no accompanying mention of Martha until 1898. Paddleford’s story, in short, was an invention of the post-Centennial age that also invented the Colonial style in housing and decorating, took a deep interest in antiques, and paid for the restoration of Mount Vernon with a series of fundraising “Martha Washington Teas” at which guests dressed in colonial costume. The Betsy Ross story first appeared about that time, as did a number of other now well-worn Revolutionary fables.

Here’s the 1854 recipe:

Beat to a cream half a pound of butter and half a pound of white sugar; then stir in eight eggs well beaten, one glass of rose-water, and one pound of sifted flour; bake in shallow and circular tins half an inch deep; when done, spread a thick layer of raspberry jam, or any marmalade or jelly, upon one cake and lay another cake upon the top of the jam, and sift white sugar over the whole. Mrs. Bliss, Practical Cook Book (Lippincott, Grambo, 1850), pp. 197-98.

The recipe is actually titled “Washington Cake,” but the author notes that it “is sometimes called Washington Pie, Lafayette Pie, Jelly Cake, &c.” From about 1830 through the 1850s it was the vogue to name cakes after Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and occasionally other Revolutionary heroes — just as they also became posthumous namesakes of streets, cities, counties, and states. This “pie” is of course just an early sort of layer cake — something all but unheard of before the middle of the nineteenth century, when round tin cake pans became widely available. Even the fanciest cakes in the fanciest eighteenth-century cookbooks weren’t layered, just lavishly spiced, studded with citron, and frosted. Layer cakes began appearing in cookbooks in the 1850s and grew popular after the Civil War; by the 1890s had spawned an astonishing diversity of flavors and styles. “Washington Pie,” though, was consistently filled with raspberry jam until after 1900, when it seems to have been crossed with the similarly incongruously named Boston Cream Pie and filled with pastry cream, instead.

In any case, Paddleford didn’t want us making Martha Washington’s alleged “pie” in 1947, nor any nineteenth-century recipe with jam or pastry cream. She and her readers were far too progressive for that! She recommended instead using Dromedary instant gingerbread mix — the brand with George Washington’s mother’s picture on the box; just add water.

Prepare one package Dromedary Gingerbread Mix and bake in two shallow tins. Use a vanilla pudding mixture as the filling. Top with a sprinkling of powdered sugar. For decoration, use maraschino cherries with strips of citron for stems and leaves.

Ah, the misuses of history and the twisted paths of legend. You know, I was going to a potluck last night, and I completely missed my chance to bake this and claim it as Martha Washington’s private recipe. Maybe next year.

My wife who takes the good photos was out, and we’d already eaten the pretty ones, but they’re not photogenic little things anyway. (I did my best, at left.) Nor are they especially sweet — at least not traditionally, but then neither are any doughnuts, traditionally. If you buy them from a grocery store, I suppose they taste more or less like Krispy Kremes, but I lost access to grocery-store fastnachts when I moved to North Carolina in 1992. The first year here my mother shipped me a box, and after that I learned to make my own. They’re fried dough, you know? But the potato makes them light and gives them a richness you can’t duplicate with butter alone, and there’s a touch of mace, which I think is just wonderful.

I can’t offer a recipe, because I’ve used the same one from The Bread Book by Judith and Evan Jones for seventeen years and never felt the need to experiment. (It’s a great book, by the way, if you’re looking for good instruction and a basic array of traditional breads.) But I can offer a good culinary history quote, from a 1951 magazine article about Pennsylvania Dutch cooking:

As I sat in Mrs. Miller’s big, low-ceilinged kitchen beside her spotless wood-burning cookstove… we discussed her doughnut recipe. She got it from her mother. “First,” she began, “you take nine cakes of yeast and 27 cups of flour–” I nearly fell off the chair. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How many doughnuts are we going to make?” She seemed puzzled. “Why,” she said, “I don’t know. I never get a chance to count them. You see, my family likes to eat them as they come from the pan. Don Eddy, “Dutch Treat,” American Magazine 151:1 (Jan. 1951), p. 111.

The recipe I use makes about a dozen and a half, and every time I make it I feel just a little inadequate. But, you know, they taste good.