Penn Press Log

Authentic Mock Scrapple

Just because vegetarians are at your table doesn't mean you can't serve traditional Pennsylvania scrapple. This mock scrapple recipe from As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine, written by local food historian William Woys Weaver, is in keeping with the Pennsylvania Dutch spirit of making the most of what's at hand or hoof. Just substitute vegetable oil for the bacon drippings or lard when frying, and the dish becomes truly meatless. Penn Press staff member Sara Davis gave the recipe a try. In the essay below, she shares the results with you.

Mock Scrapple (Blinder Panhaas)

1 quart (1 liter) reserved cooking stock from vegetables, peas, or beans
1 cup (200g) parched (dark roasted) cornmeal
1/2 cup (75g) buckwheat flour
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground pepper
1 teaspoon summer savory (dried leaves)
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon powdered hot pepper (optional)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt or to taste

Put the reserved cooking broth in a large saucepan and bring it to a gentle boil. Sift together the cornmeal and the buckwheat into a bowl and pour 2 1/2 cups (625ml) of the hot broth over this. Whisk smooth to remove all lumps, then pour this into the remaining broth. Bring to a gentle boil, stirring constantly to thicken the mixture. After cooking for 15 minutes, add the ground pepper, savory, allspice, and hot pepper if desired. Season with salt. Continue cooking and stirring until the mixture thickens (20 to 30 minutes). Pour this into a small, greased bread pan or an earthenware terrine. Set aside to cool and set. Chill overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day turn out the mock scrapple, slice, and brown in bacon drippings or lard in a hot iron skillet.

The Results

I didn’t grow up in Pennsylvania and never tried scrapple until I’d lived here for several years. To my great surprise, I love it. Never mind what’s in it: good scrapple is crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, savory and satisfying. So when I saw the recipe for mock scrapple, I knew I had to try it.

Blinder Panhaas is a great dish for the frugal cook to have in her repertoire: the recipe is essentially a means to turn leftover cooking stock and some basic kitchen staples into a tasty accompaniment. As it happens, I am already a committed maker and saver of homemade stock: I freeze vegetable scraps from cooking—carrot peels, onion tops, herb stems—and make a large batch of stock every few months. Furthermore, I had planned two consecutive nights of cooking with my neighbor, who hosts a big dinner party every March, so I had time and company to accommodate the two stages of cooking mock scrapple.

My neighbor and I didn’t have the recommended roasted corn meal and buckwheat flour, so we used oat flour and regular corn meal instead, feeling that it was appropriate to the waste-not-want-not spirit of the dish. But of course, swapping ingredients can change the taste and texture. If we had used the recommended dark grains and bean stock, the scrapple would have had an earthier, possibly nutty flavor; ours was lighter in taste and appearance, resembling a coarse polenta until we added seasoning. We had the savory, coriander, and allspice recommended by the book, which are spices often found in sausage and scrapple, but one could probably substitute other earthy seeds and green herbs (sage or thyme, fennel or caraway) to good effect. We also went with the optional teaspoon of red pepper, which tasted very hot in the uncooked meal but mellowed a great deal with cooking.

Texture-wise, our light flour and corn meal mix was possibly a lot thirstier than roasted grains would have been: my mix soaked up all the stock I poured into it, so it was difficult to whisk. I ended up stirring it with a wooden paddle until it smoothed. Once I poured it back into the hot stock, I found it easier to whisk, but I needed to add a little more stock while the grains cooked. (This also might be a problem with my technique, as I’ve had similar experiences making polenta.)

We poured the cooked meal into a square baking dish and left it in the fridge overnight to set.

The next day, after we’d wrangled a turkey into the oven and prepared several pounds of green beans and Brussels sprouts, I cut the cold, firm scrapple into thick triangles. This pan yielded about thirty-two thick wedges. We fried them in about a quarter inch of vegetable oil (to keep it meatless for visiting vegetarians), flipping each piece once to brown on both sides.

 

Mock Scrapple Frying

The finished triangles tasted pretty good—as most fried things do! We put some on a plate with apple butter, as the book recommends, and really enjoyed the contrast of crispy, savory scrapple with the sweet, tart fruit preserve. We weren’t trying to fool anyone with these, but interestingly, a few late guests supposed that they were eating traditional scrapple. I guess that the combination of savory spices and the familiar creamy cornmeal texture seemed close enough. Others figured they were eating some kind of corn fritter. In any case, the plate we set out as an appetizer was soon empty.

Sara Davis is the Direct Mail and Advertising Manager for Penn Press and the writer behind the scenesofeating.com blog.

Check our Pi/Pie Day post for another staff-pleasing recipe from As American as Shoofly Pie.

Paul's Pick: a Free Article from Humanity

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's pick for November is "Some Rights Are More Equal than Others: The Third World and the Transformation of Economic and Social Rights"  by Roland Burke, author of Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. The article appears in Winter 2012 issue of Humanity.

  Donofrio writes:

This essay will examine the impact of the Third World on the development and
subsequent reprioritization of economic and social rights. Between the 1940s and the late 1970s, these rights became an established feature of the international human rights order. While the Cold War division on human rights politics was often conceptualized as a struggle over the status of social rights in relation to traditional civil and political freedoms, there was significant support for economic and social rights from the Western democracies.

Click here to download this free article and learn more about Humanity, an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism, and development.

Check the Penn Press Log in February for Paul's next pick.

School Reform Then and Now: Legacies of the Civil Rights Era

Guest blogger John P. Spencer, author of In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform, comments on the history behind contemporary public education debates.

Legacies of the Civil Rights Era: Accountability and Attention to Poverty

The past decade has brought a steady stream of commentary on how education is the “civil rights issue of our time,” most recently from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But education has been a civil rights issue for decades—and not just in Brown v. Board of Education or Little Rock, but in urban communities with low-performing schools.

Revisiting the 1960s shows us that the civil rights era left a dual legacy in school reform, half of which echoes loudly today and half of which is too often ignored. The part that still echoes is an ethos of accountability: sixties-era activists and educators helped to pioneer the idea that urban schools should be held accountable for student achievement. The part that is being ignored is a recognition that achievement is also powerfully shaped by what goes on outside of schools—especially the effects of poverty. Unfortunately, neglect of the latter lesson is seriously undermining the potentially useful impact of the former one.

Global Corruption Fighters: Robert F. Kennedy

The new book Global Corruption: Money, Power, and Ethics in the Modern World suggests ways in which the problems caused by corruption can be addressed and ultimately prevented. Written by Laurence Cockcroft, a development economist and a founding member of Transparency International, the book not only exposes corruption and the toll it takes on the world's poor. It also highlights women and men who stood up to dishonest practices, often at the cost of their lives.

In the coming weeks, we'll feature some of the prominent corruption fighters in Cockcroft's book, beginning close to home with a familiar American politcial figure, Robert F. Kennedy.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy testifying before a Senate subcommittee hearing on crime. U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Robert Kennedy serveed on the United States Senate's McClellan Committee from 1957 to 1959. As Attorney General, Kennedy "continued to believe that organized crime as a bigger threat to the US political system than communism," says Crockcroft, who sees the late senator as an example of "the effect that one catalyst can have in seeing that a judical systems is effective--a true alignment of standards with ethics."

Cockcroft writes:

Bobby Kennedy made his name as a young advocate who successfully identified, through Senate hearings, the mafia links of two of the most powerful union bosses in American history: Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters' Union, which in the 1950s had a membership of 1.5 million and dominated the trucking and related industries. . . . As a believer in the American system, Kennedy despised Hoffa for his conviction that American society was irredeemably corrupt. He feared that organized crime was spreading its tentacles from the underworld into labour relations, business and politics and that this reflected the "moral sickness of a greedy society."

 

There's More to Publicity than Free Books

Chloe Bollentin has a passion for proofreading, but she put down the red pen and picked up a few lessons about book publicity during her summer internship in the Press marketing department. In the final post in our summer intern series, Bollentin shares what she learned.

The summer I worked at my mom’s one-person publishing company, I spent hours at a time editing. From tweaking the grammar in the annual report to proofing a cookbook manuscript, I loved every minute of it. That experience and my passion for proofreading led me to apply for an internship with Penn Press. I was surprised when I was offered the opportunity to work in the Press marketing department. But I decided to take a step out of my comfort zone and accept.

Publicity was never a field I’d considered, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d always imagined that if I were going to work in publishing, I’d want to be an editor, working closely with the manuscript and ultimately feeling a sense of pride and responsibility for the final product, the same kind of pride I’d felt when the cookbook I’d spent so many hours editing hit the shelves. Could I really get the same sense of satisfaction from working in a field where the books are, for the most part, already in their final stages of production by the time they reached my desk?

At first I wasn’t so sure. One of the first things I learned during my internship was that the Press Publicity Manager, Saunders Robinson, is personally responsible for soliciting publicity and reviews for every book the Press publishes. At first, this arrangement didn’t seem to leave much room for serious involvement with the books. At the beginning of the summer I worked on a series of clerical tasks, such as assigning each forthcoming book to a list of review outlets in our database. I knew that it was important to carefully decide where we would send the precious free copies we give away to possible reviewers. But since the Press asks the authors to give us a list of publications where they think their book could be reviewed, much of the time I felt as though the interesting workthe work that involves really knowing the book--had already been done. My main job, it seemed, was data entry. Was this all there was to publicity--making lists of where to send free books?

As it turned out, tasks like this only scratched the surface of the publicity world. Soon I learned that the Penn Press publicist does work closely with books. Sometimes she picks out books that she thinks could be popular, even if they aren’t expected to be, and makes a project out of soliciting reviews for them. From how she spoke about the satisfaction she gets from making an underdog book a publicity success, I recognized that this was similar to the kind of satisfaction I’d gotten from editing a manuscript. I started to wonder if maybe editing and publicity were, in some ways, just different means to a similar end. Maybe publicity was something I could enjoy.

As the weeks went by, my tasks got more interesting, and my positive feelings towards publicity grew. I started to learn that to publicize a book well, you need to know the book well, even if you can’t sit down and read every word. In fact, publicizing a book requires knowing it in a certain way, the kind of knowledge you can’t get just from editing the manuscript. It’s not enough to know what the book is about; you have to know who would want to read it. The audience for a book on the history of stewardesses is vastly different from the audience for a book on the history of the Pennsylvania railroad. Publicity, I discovered, isn’t just about reaching as many people as possible; it’s about reaching the right people. Before this summer, I might have thought that the best possible place to have a book reviewed--any book--would be the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books. But since working at Penn Press, I’ve learned that publicizing a book, especially the highly specialized books the Press publishes, takes more creativity than that. Rather than targeting only the most popular publications--where the chances of having a review published are slim to none anyway--I’m better off spending time researching what niche TV and radio programs might be interested in, for example, a medieval Arab cookbook. A review on one of those shows might not reach as many people as a review in the New York Times, but the people who hear it are more likely to buy the book. And when they do, I know I’ll feel as satisfied as if I’d edited the manuscript myself.

Working as Penn Press’s publicity intern has given me the opportunity to appreciate a different aspect of publishing, one whose effects you see only after the book has hit the shelves: namely, who takes it off the shelves and why. Sometimes I still miss those long hours hunched over a stack of papers with a red pen in hand, and who knows, maybe editing is still where I’ll end up. But now every time I pick up my favorite magazine and read a review of a book that sounds perfect for me, I’ll understand the effort that went into bringing that book to my attention.

Chloe Bollentin begins her sophomore year at Smith College this fall.

Labor Rights on Labor Day

In this guest blog post Susan L. Kang, author of Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy, points out the value of labor rights and looks at recent opposition to collective bargaining in the United States from an international perspective.

Celebrating Labor Rights on Labor Day

As we celebrate the 188th Labor Day, commemorating the struggles of the American labor movement, through picnics, parades, or the simple enjoyment of our leisure, we should also consider the gravity of the recent coordinated attacks on union rights. Commentator Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post recently claimed that collective bargaining “as a right” is a “failing issue,” evidenced by the unsuccessful recall efforts in Wisconsin. Supposedly, citizens concerned with budgetary problems now regard public sector union rights as neither necessary nor politically feasible. Rather than a “right,” which implies a universal and fundamental protection, public sector collective bargaining is merely a “privilege.” And since privileges are legislatively provided, it is legitimate to legislatively remove them in response to political and economic conditions.

We would be better off understanding the situation in Wisconsin, and similar events in Ohio, as a demonstration of the fundamental importance of union rights, both in the United States and internationally. Both sides of this political contest recognize that workers' right to organize affects election results and public policy. Furthermore, thinking internationally about the current struggle over union rights in American can help us understand why this conflict is so intractable. It can also help us see how advocates of union rights might strategize in their struggles.

Medieval Monday: Five Myths about Medieval Women and Power

Guest blogger Janna Bianchini, Assistant Professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of The Queen's Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile, busts some common misconceptions about women in the Middle Ages.

When I mentioned to a friend that my new book was called The Queen’s Hand, his eyes got wide. “You mean like in Game of Thrones?” he said. Sadly for my hopes of record-breaking sales, no. But this is one of those cases where reality is cooler than fiction. In George R. R. Martin’s epic, the King’s (or Queen’s) Hand is an official who handles the dull administrative work of ruling so that the monarch can feast and joust and hold court. In thirteenth-century Iberia (the peninsula now occupied by Spain and Portugal), the queen’s hand was literally that—her hand, the symbol of her authority. She didn’t delegate her power to someone else; she used it herself.

The Middle Ages isn’t generally thought of as a period friendly to women at all, much less to powerful ones. Still, we’re all familiar with a handful of medieval and early modern women who had extraordinary influence: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of Castile, Elizabeth I of England. The subject of my book, Berenguela of Castile, is one of their lesser-known peers. But the focus on women like Berenguela as “exceptions to the rule” has the strange effect of reinforcing old myths about medieval women. Were these women exceptional? Oh, yes. But they didn’t come from nowhere, and their success depended on navigating a society that was much more complex than these myths assume.

A Publishing Internship Packing List

In this installment in our series of summer intern blog posts, Julie Carlson shows prospective scholarly publishing beginners how to pack light for their cubicle adventures.

Whenever summer draws to a close, I inevitably feel the urge to run off and spend a few days in some exotic, sunny locale. Unfortunately, even if such an impromptu vacation was financially feasible, I know myself well enough to know that I would inevitably find my voyage taxing, my skin burnt, and my feet blistered; basically, I would hate the trip. Nevertheless, my wanderlust persists. Foreseeing this conflict of interests, I preemptively decided to pass this summer in the relatively-relaxing environ of Philadelphia, where I’ve spent 10 weeks on an exciting safari through the world of a scholarly press. For like-minded peers who may wish to follow in my footsteps, here are a few items for your packing list.

Dance Opens Window to Cervantes Play for Penn Press Intern

In August, our summer interns take over the blog in a series of guest posts. This week, intern Grace Molloy shares the connections she discovered between her interest in dance and a forthcoming paperback release of Miguel de Cervantes'  "The Bagnios of Algiers" and "The Great Sultana": Two Plays of Captivity, edited and translated by Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika.

A few months ago, I sleepily stumbled across my college campus to sit in a dance studio and watch historical dances projected against a chalkboard for my Dance History class. To some college students, this may sound like a nap trap, but the flowing movements of Loie Fuller and the energetic taps of the Nicholas Brothers in “Stormy Weather” captivated me. The one thing these different dancers have in common is the influence of historical dances from which their styles derived. Thanks to these lessons in performance history, the dances and movement elements in Barbara Fuchs’ and Aaron J. Ilika’s translation of Miguel de Cervantes’ “The Great Sultana” drew me into the culture of the seventeenth-century Spanish play.

In the introduction to the translation, Fuchs and Ilika provide Cervantes’ description of the evolution of theater in Spain. The famous author tells us about a playwright who “invented machines, clouds, thunder and lightning, challenges and battles.” These showy elements were reminiscent of the extravagance I learned about in the sixteenth-century French court ballets, which contained other artistic elements such as opera, poetry, jousts, and even parades. Additionally, a footnote of “The Great Sultana” states that a dance often concluded Spanish plays of this period; this is similar to the grand ballet, a participatory dance to conclude the court ballets. Although the French court ballets were still developing in the early 1600s and had not yet reached Spain, the similarities and historical connections I found between these performance arts were exciting.

There are a few specific dances referenced in “The Great Sultana:” the saraband, zambapalo, chacona, pésame dello, folía, and bergamasca.

Fuchs and Ilika describe the bergamasca as “a lusty sixteenth-century dance depicting the reputedly awkward manners of the inhabitants of Bergamo, in northern Italy, where it supposedly originated.” If you watch the video above, you can notice the sometimes stiff and tentative movements of this dance.

To escape death, Madrigal, a character in the play, promises to teach the Ottoman Sultan’s elephant to speak Turkish in ten years. He references the bergamasca when he is describing the languages that he use in the elephant’s lessons. Clearly, Cervantes uses the term “language” loosely here, but it is unsurprising that a man named Madrigal would consider music and dance to be a form of communication. While later discussing what he and the other musicians should sing for the Great Sultana, Madrigal also references the saraband, a slow, Spanish waltz. The remaining dances mentioned are “racy and often censored in Spain at the time,” so I found it surprising that Madrigal knew of them and would suggest singing them for such an honored guest. However, watching the above video of the chacona, it is amusing to see what the seventeeth-century Spaniards considered racy.

Although it is difficult to find modern performances of many of those dances, they have served as essential stepping-stones in dance history. It pleased me to discover these cultural details in Fuchs’ and Ilika’s translation of “The Great Sultana” because they truly bought the text and the time period to life. As Madrigal says, “Spanish women are born dancers straight from their mothers’ wombs.” Cervantes clearly viewed dance as an important aspect of seventeenth-century Spanish culture, and Fuchs and Ilika have preserved this in the translation.

Grace Molloy is a rising junior at Kenyon College. She is studying Comparative Literature, focusing on poetry in Spanish, English, and religious texts.

Early African American Print Culture--Now Available

 Early African American Print Culture
Edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein
432 pages | 6 x 9 | 43 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4425-0 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

"Early African American Print Culture reads like a manifesto, a call to action--sometimes directly, by cataloging the work that remains to be done, and sometimes simply by offering models of scholarship on familiar and unfamiliar authors and texts. The central point, of course, is that we need to attend to the whole of American print culture if we are to understand the complexities of African American writing throughout the nineteenth century."--John Ernest, West Virginia University

Early African American Print Culture presents seventeen original essays that demonstrate how the study of African American print culture might enrich the study of print culture, while at the same time expanding the terrain of African American literature beyond authorship to editing, illustration, printing, circulation, and reading. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.