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Scrapple. Philadelphia Style

Scrapple is a pork head loaf made with cornmeal, salt, pepper, sage, and fried after baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Scrapple. Philadelphia Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Clean the pig's head and place it in a stew pan with 2 quarts of hot water.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours.

  3. Remove the head and cool.

  4. Once cool, remove the bones and chop the meat finely.

  5. Add 2 teaspoons of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of pepper, and 2 leaves of sage to the meat.

Make the mush

  1. Return the mixture to the liquor and bring to a boil.

  2. Sprinkle in cornmeal while stirring quickly.

  3. Cook for 2 hours without burning.

Set and fry

  1. Cool in a deep pan.

  2. Cut into slices.

  3. Roll the slices in flour or breadcrumbs and fry until brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pig's head
Provides the meat and gelatinous liquor that give the scrapple its body and flavour.
Cornmeal
Thickens the cooking liquor into a mush that sets firm when cooled.
Sage
Adds the characteristic herbal aroma that defines the flavour of scrapple.

The step that matters

Stirring in the cornmeal. Cornmeal added to hot liquid clumps easily and can scorch on the bottom. Sprinkling it in while stirring quickly disperses the starch evenly, and keeping the mush moving prevents burning during the long cook.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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