Photo: Vrapple
Humble scrapple has been having something of a renaissance lately - with nouveau upstarts like MidAtlantic’s crab scrapple, vegan riffs like Vrapple and Silk City’s version that incorporates foie gras. But apparently it’s not the first time the lowly loaf had a surge in popularity. The New York Times dug into its archives and discovered that in 1872, a sort of proto-internet discussion on the pros and cons of the the colonial-era dish took place via the letters section of the paper, with pseudonymous readers writing in to praise its merits, trade recipes and condemn its potential for causing trichinosis. Even then, scrapple struggled with image problems!
The Way We Ate: The Great Scrapple Correspondence of 1872 [NYT]
