Meat & Grain Sausages

When Germans immigrated to America they brought along recipes for meat and grain sausages, made with beef and/or pork and some sort of grain, such as oatmeal or cornmeal and packed with herbs and spices. Originally the food of farm workers, these meat mixtures utilized the least expensive parts of the animal, namely organ meats, mixed them with steel-cut oats, cornmeal or buckwheat and used strong spices like garlic, clove, ginger and mace to balance it out. Meat bones were used to make a flavorful broth for making the sausages and the added collogen from the bones helps with the thickening and setting of the sausage.

Recipes:
     Scrapple
     Goetta
     Knapwurst

Scrapple

Scrapple is commonly considered an ethnic food of the Pennsylvania Dutch, descendants of late 17th and early 18th century immigrants to Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Jersey, Virginia and North Carolina from southern Germany, eastern France (Alsace and Lorraine) and Switzerland. including the Mennonites and Amish. Scrapple is something like a meaty fried polenta or cornmeal mush to which seasonings and relatively lean cooked meat, usually pork, have been added.

The original scrapple recipes were created to eliminate waste and use as much of the butchered animal as possible so original scrapple was made of hog offal, such as the head, heart, liver, and other trimmings, which are boiled with any bones attached (often the entire head), to make a broth. Once cooked, bones and fat are removed, the meat is finely chopped and returned to meat broth in which the (dry) cornmeal or buckwheat flour is boiled to make a mush. Seasonings, typically sage, thyme, savory, black pepper, and others are added to broth. Buckwheat was very popular in Germany, Poland and Russia so it comes as not a surprise that the Pennsylvania Germans preferred buckwheat for thickening scrapple. Occasionally, cornmeal or regular flour was used instead of buckwheat, or sometimes combined with buckwheat.

The cooked mixture is poured into loaf pans and refrigerated overnight to stiffen. Then it is sliced, dusted with flour and fried in a little butter, oil or bacon grease. Scrapple is typically cut into quarter-inch to three-quarter-inch slices and pan-fried in butter, bacon grease or oil until brown to form a crust. It is it is important to let each side brown thoroughly before attempting to turn it over or it will stick and fall apart. Scrapple is usually eaten as a breakfast side dish. It can be served plain or with either apple butter, applesauce, ketchup, jelly, maple syrup, honey, or mustard. Scrapple freezes very well; just slice it and place in freezer bags.

Etymologically, "scrapple" is a diminutive of "scrap", a reference to its composition. The roots of the culinary traditions that led to the development of scrapple in America have been traced back to pre-Roman Europe. The more immediate culinary ancestor of scrapple was the Low German dish called panhas, which was adapted to make use of locally available ingredients, and it is still called "Pannhaas", "panhoss", "ponhoss", or "pannhas" in parts of Pennsylvania.

Goetta

In southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky the top breakfast meat is goetta (pronounced "get-UH"), a loose sausage made with ground pork and beef, steel-cut oats, onions, garlic and a lot of spices including mace, marjoram, ginger, coriander, white pepper and cloves. The breakfast sausage is formed into thick patties and then pan fried. Some restaurants serve rectangles of handmade goetta; commercial purveyors sell the sausage in tubes that can be sliced into rounds at home. No matter the shape, the slightly mushy texture with crisp, crumbly edges and the pungent spice of the sausage remain constants.

Goetta is similar to scrapple, but scrapple is made with pork, whereas goetta is made with both pork and beef. Goetta uses oats as the binder and scrapple uses cornmeal and sometimes buckwheat, and the seasonings differ.

Goetta was first introduced to the U.S. through an influx of German immigrants to Cincinnati in the 1830s. In Germany it had been known as gruetzwurst, a dish farm workers ate for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Made up with organ meats, oats and a lot of pungent spices, the gruetzwurst was a way to use up scraps of meat and cheaper cuts or pork and beef. As the sausage evolved in the U.S. to become known as goetta, it became a favored breakfast food with higher-quality ingredients.