Everything but the squeal

The first time I tried scrapple, I was sitting on a stool at the Exmore Diner on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and I had to ask the local fellow sitting next to me what it was, exactly.

He put his coffee down, turned to me, and shook his head.

“You don’t want to know.”

But, of course, I did. So I pressed. A little.

To make a long description short, scrapple is a kind of sausage – and we know how making sausage is compared to all messy processes, including the political variety (“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made," said the oft-quoted Otto von Bismarck.) As long as you like the outcome, you don’t want to know what goes into it.

I ordered the scrapple anyway.

It was delicious. Creamy and savory on the inside, crunchy and crispy on the outside, a bit salty. You have to fry it long enough, the cook advised, or it really is awful, mushy and unappealing and too close to what it is: the discarded scraps of the pig slaughtering process, the who-knows-what bits like ears and snouts and, I don’t know, maybe eyelids. The cook did not, of course, describe such things across the breakfast counter.

I’m not sure why there’s all this aversion to eating every part of the animal. If you can get past eating animals at all – their legs, their bellies, their butts – why would it matter if you also eat their livers and hearts and gizzards, whatever those are? I think eating “everything but the squeal” is smart. Admirable, even. Waste not, want not.

Though I do draw the line at beef tongue. Its texture is waaaaaay too close to that of my own tongue. And it’s not even dressed up with a nice name to help me forget what it is – like “tripe” for intestine, or “sweetbreads” for glands.

But mostly, I think it’s a great idea to use every part of the pig. In her book, Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pa slaughtered a pig, took the bladder, cleaned it, blew it up like a balloon, and gave it to his girls to play with, like a ball. Laura and her sister, Mary, also put the pig tail on a stick and roasted it over the fire; they were so excited to eat it, they burned their mouths on it every time, never waiting for it to cool.

The same concept can be brought to the vegetable garden. At one point, our food co-op had an arrangement where if you hauled away a portion of the produce department discards as compost once a week, you got a 10 percent discount on your groceries. It was the best deal ever: I got great compost for my garden, I got the discount, and I got to pick through what they were tossing to find all sorts of edible food – whole red bell peppers with just a bit that had gone soft, apples with nicks and bruises that were perfect for applesauce, potatoes with blemishes. Granted, I had to root through soggy lettuce and smelly, yellowed broccoli and slimy carrots, but it was worth it.

This week, I salvaged vegetables from the garden before the weather turned seriously cold. I picked all the green tomatoes, stripped the pepper plants, and grabbed the basil for one more batch of pesto. And since I don’t love fried green tomatoes, I found a recipe for green tomato pie. Delicious.

Well, I thought so. Here’s another opinion:

Me: So, what do you think?

My honey: I think it would be better with apples.

Me: It does taste a bit like apple pie, doesn’t it?

My honey: Yeah. They both have crusts.

Two nights later, it had somehow gotten better, and we shared it with our wonderful friends whose table we always enjoy: they often serve us beef raised in their back yard, and veggies from their garden. Tonight, it was pork roast from a local farm, mustard greens we brought from another friend’s garden, and a wonderful baked combination of apples, figs, mushrooms and egg white. They also gave us some home-cured pepperoni and sausages to take home with us – complete with a description of how they were made.

You don’t want to know.