Marlin Dietrich still remembers that late July weekend in 1969.
He was a young teenager helping his parents, Willard and Verna, dry several bushels of green beans that hadn’t sold at their weekend stand at the Renninger’s Farmer’s Market in Kutztown.
They were in the kitchen of their farmhouse feeding the wood stove while drying the beans in a steam dryer, a process that would make the ingredients for string beans and ham later in the winter.
“I dried a whole week,” Dietrich said. “That was my job.”
A small black-and-white television in the kitchen was tuned to the Apollo 11 lunar landing that mesmerized the nation as well as the Dietrich household as Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin were the first humans to explore the surface of the moon.
Fast forward a couple of decades.
A postcard arrives at Dietrich’s Meats and Country Store, which celebrated its 50th year in Krumsville, Greenwich Township, last year.
The sender mentions that he was in Allentown for a program and wanted to know where he could get some good scrapple. Someone recommended Dietrich’s.
“I ended up here,” he wrote. “It was great. I liked everything. And P.S., that’s me on the other side.”
On the other side of the postcard is the photo Neil Armstrong took of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon.
“Imagine that,” Dietrich said.
“We have that postcard around here somewhere,” he said, glancing at the walls and bookshelves of his office tucked into the corner of the store. “We’re Pennsylvania Dutch. We don’t throw anything out.”
And therein, too, lies the philosophy of scrapple.
When Berks Country last visited Dietrich’s in December for a feature on pork and sauerkraut, Marlin mentioned that they would be making scrapple later in the week and invited us back to watch the process, if we wanted.
It would have been journalistic malpractice not to.
Although the name scrapple implies waste, that isn’t the case at Dietrich’s.
They deliberately leave some meat on the bones for the scrapple-making process.
Edwin Kutz of Kempton stirs broth in the scrapple pot at Dietrich’s Meats and Country Store in Krumsville, Greenwich Township. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE)
“It’s not meat scrap on the bone, it’s a little bone. It’s not scrap,” he said. “People think, ‘0h yeah, scraps.’ No. It’s brisket bones, pork quarter bones, you know, you got some meat on the bones and you cook it off. You get the flavor. And so, actually, what it is, if you would trim all the meat off your bones, you throw the bones away. So you leave some meat on, and you cook it up. If you want to have a fancy word instead of scrapple, say meat trimmings.”
Scrapple making takes an entire day, beginning with cooking the beef and pork bones early in the morning. The large scrapple pot is filled to the brim and cooked thoroughly, the resulting broth saved.
“That’s what gives you a good broth, a good stock,” Dietrich said. “The bones are what give you a good stock.”
There’s no quick process to make scrapple the right way, Dietrich said while standing over the large scrapple pot simmering with pork and beef bones. “You can hurry, but then it won’t be right.”
Workers separate meat from the bones to make scrapple at Dietrich’s Meats and Country Store in Krumsville, Greenwich Township. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE)
The workers in the back shop usually perform singular tasks, but scrapple making becomes a communal affair when they gather around a table to separate by hand the meat from the bones, bantering back and forth as they work.
One man pulls a clump of meat from a bone and holds it up.
“Look, there’s nothing scrap about this,” he said, tossing the meat onto a growing pile of trimmings.
The meat will be ground up with some other organ meats and added back to the scrapple pot along with the broth that was separated in the initial cooking.
Although Dietrich doesn’t have a recipe that he follows, merely seasoning the scrapple by taste, there are several consistent ingredients depending on in which county the scrapple is made.
The scrapple is thickened by buckwheat flour and cornmeal.
“In Berks County, people like more buckwheat,” he said. “If you go to Lancaster, there’s more cornmeal.”
Spices consist of salt, pepper and coriander. Farther west, marjoram is used instead of coriander, giving scrapple its regional derivations.
“Definitely Berks, Lehigh, Northampton, it’s salt, pepper and coriander,” Dietrich said. “If you don’t have coriander, it’s not gonna work. But when you get out of the area, there are different recipes, you know, like everything else.”
Dietrich’s scrapple tends to be darker than others because there’s more meat in it, he said.
When the scrapple in the pot reaches the right consistency, it’s poured out into five-pound pans to cool, yielding a two-week supply of over 700 pounds.
The best way to fry scrapple, Dietrich said, is to thinly slice it into a large, iron skillet with a spoonful of lard. Add in raw-fried potatoes — those are sliced right from the potato as opposed to home fries that are boiled first.
“Like my mom made them, she put the raw fries in the black-iron skillet with lard in it,” he said. “Man, it made it crack. They make noise because the potato had a little bit of water in it. You could tell, she was making raw fries. Yeah, but they got good.”
Some people like the scrapple a little bit soft in the middle, while others like it crispy, Dietrich said.
The toppings for scrapple also vary.
“I like apple butter, some people like maple syrup,” he said. “Some put ketchup, honey or molasses on it.”
The proof of Dietrich’s scrapple is in the eating at the Quality Shop restaurant in Kutztown. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE)
The proof of the scrapple is in the eating, so Berks Country went in pursuit of Dietrich’s scrapple out in the wild.
We didn’t have to drive far — just six miles south of Dietrich’s to the Quality Shoppe restaurant in Kutztown.
We sidled up to the counter and asked the waitress from where they got their scrapple.
“Dietrich’s!” she exclaimed, with an inflection that implied, where else?
The scrapple arrived thinly sliced and crispy, flopping over the edge of the plate with the home fries and eggs over easy.
Some pancake syrup on top and a forkful of scrapple later, it’s — in memory of Buzz Aldrin — out of this world.