Scrapple revisited

I grew up on scrapple. After Pearl Harbor, dad went to war and we moved from Norfolk to stay with extended family in Milford, NJ, where scrapple was as necessary as eggs for breakfast. After the war, we moved to Texas and found scrapple in the markets there, too. It's only when we moved to California in 1948 that scrapple was hard to find.

I started making my own scrapple in the 1960s in grad school. I found an old-fashioned hand crank meat grinder at a garage sale and I was off and running. I became the Scrapple King of the Eng Dept. Well, there was no competition actually. One day I came home from class to find a cardboard box on the porch. Inside was a pig's head! I told a friend who lived in the country and raised pigs to save me the head the next time he slaughtered one. He did, in grand style. What a great batch of scrapple I made!

I lost the meat grinder and almost everything else I owned in the explosion of my personal life in the late 1970s. I returned west from Maryland's Eastern  Shore, where the stores also carried scrapple. But it was hard to find in the west. I went for a long time without scrapple in my life.

A few years ago I saw a recipe for "easy scrapple" that used ground pork instead of a meat grinder. I tried it. I was okay, close enough under the circumstances, and this is the recipe I've perfected in recent months. Then a few weeks ago I found a small hand meat grinder for sale, light weight and kitchen compatible and under $30. What the heck? I bought it.

It arrived today and tonight I'll make my first batch of scrapple, grinding my own meat, in over 30 years. I can't wait to taste it.