Better Than Bacon
If you think scrapple is local, wait for my next food test. I’ll try to answer the real New Jersey food question - not the silly Is it “sauce” or “gravy”? question kept going by pseudo-Italians from Staten Island, but the real one - Is it Taylor Ham or Pork Roll?
Taylor ham with cheese on a Portuguese roll with a bottle of Fanta Orange. Now that’s a real New Jersey lunch!
I’ll have to give you my homemade scrapple recipe. Mostly it’s corn mush (also homemade) with onion, sausage, and shredded cheese, poured into a bread pan and baked. Then you let it cool. Remove from the pan, slice, dredge in cornmeal and fry it up. Great with sautéed sliced apples. Scrapple & apple. Used to pack that for lunch frequently.
If anybody thinks I’m joking, I got the recipe from my Julia Child cookbook. I added the cheese. And the catsup.
Drew,
A meatball foot-long hero from Pinto’s on South main Street in Hackensack, NJ or a couple of hotdogs from Rutts Hut in Clifton, NJ were my favorite lunches back in the early 1970’s. Hagler’s restaurant in Oradell did up some nice lunches too.
I’m not sure if Pinto’s Deli still exists or not.
Hagler’s is long gone and another more fancy place is there.
and
Rutt’s hut is there but the original owners are not.
I’ll take Chorizo anyday. The salvary glands adds to the flavor as well as the Mexican spices.
Fun article, thanks.
Reiux - I am a big chorizo fan too. Even the bland stuff they sell in the grocery stores is good, but the real deal you can find in the bodegas and mexi-marts is much zestier.
Damn, why do manufacturers water down the recipes for everything “ethnic”? We have a standing joke that such products are “____” (jerk sauce, chorizo, tamales, spicy food etc) “for white people”. Yet the magazines are full of “the new taste sensation” from some other country, and “foreign” restaurants are doing better than anything in the big cities. People WANT the new tastes. So why water it down to nothing when the foodstuffs come to the common market?
We have a couple of Carnecerias a few miles from where I live. I can get Chorizo loose (no casing) and another favorite, Barbacoa, cooked and ready to eat.
You’re telling me there’s something lower than Spam?
Posted by harleycowboy58
01/19/2012 at 03:26 PM
Watch it harley. This is serious scrapple. Also known as ‘hush puppies’. Because they’d cook this up and throw it to the dogs to shut them up.
I’ve yet to see a dog or cat eat Spam. Ever!
The thing about Spam ... you have to rinse it. Just like chipped beef. Cut the slices, put them in a pan, and then pour hot water over them and let them sit 5-10 minutes. Then drain and fry. Most of the salt taste goes away, and the meat tastes as good as any hot dog, probably better.
Now if you want to talk truly awful, there are canned Vienna Sausages and Potted Meat Product. That’s the real bottom of the barrel IMO.
Scrapple is far better than Spam, and a really good scrapple is a real treat.
Chris - I thought hush puppies were some kind of fried cornmeal dough thingies?
Drew? Your point? Read my first comment.
Hushpuppies are balls of cornmeal based dough fried up, normally served with fish. They are called hushpuppies because they were cooked with the leftover fish batter and thrown to the dogs to keep them from getting the fried fish.
Usually, for human consumption, they are made with beer, buttermilk, scallions, onions or anything your heart desires.Very tasty addition to a fried fish and taste a LOT better than the abortions that Long John Silver serves up.
Oh…
Gravy is anything you serve on another (meat, noodles or small animals) made with the fat of an animal and flour, or roux to the uninitiated. A sauce normally has neither.
01/19/2012 at 04:11 AM
