Ode to Scrapple

Sing scrapple: buckwheat- & cornmeal mush-stuffed relative of head cheese, the hog’s gray matter. Plus every part that couldn’t be cured into ham or crammed into sausage casings — some good foot meat, perhaps, a corkscrew piece of tail — up to & including the oleaginous grunt. Always the butt of jokes for the ignorant mass of weiner-eaters who prefer their pig scraps pink & prefitted for the throat. This is a square meal the color of earth. It’s what’s for supper when you haven’t eaten since breakfast, & want something you can slap in the hot fat of a griddle & fry until it grows a thick brown skin. Then serve with Grade-A maple syrup, go hog- wild, wallow in the gray & gritty mush.