This vegan scrapple has a cult following, and now it’s back by popular demand

For a regional breakfast meat that’s famous for showcasing unwanted pig parts, a vegan alternative for scrapple might seem near impossible, if not totally beside the point. But when Sarah Cain developed and debuted her Vrapple in 2008 — well before animal-free meats became inescapable in mainstream food culture — she realized she’d struck gold. The all-natural, seitan-based loaf captured all the umami flavor and distinct grittiness of Pennsylvania Dutch product scrapple without any of the, erm, snout parts.

“Scrapple is basically polenta with some good spices,” said Cain, who first got the idea over twenty years ago, listening to her vegetarian then-boyfriend constantly complain about missing scrapple.

Vrapple had gone on hiatus after Cain moved out West. But after internet fans squealed for its return, the pork-mush substitute lives again.

For the uninitiated, scrapple is a highly seasoned mush of pig scraps stewed with cornmeal that’s formed into loaves, sliced, and fried for breakfast in and around Eastern Pennsylvania. Cain landed on seitan as a texturally appropriate meat substitute, and fooled around with recipes from the many old Amish and Mennonite cookbooks she collects.

While Cain has never been a vegan, she didn’t like that scrapple was typically made from pigs in confined farming spaces. “It’s the last of the last bits,” she said. “I only ever had one bite of scrapple, and that was enough. I felt like I was eating cartilage with so much salt.”

At the time, Cain was working at the (now closed) Fair Food Farmstand in the Reading Terminal Market, where she sold her surprisingly hearty plant-based scrapple and handed out samples, cubed and fried to crispy perfection. Her Vrapple became so popular she began selling it to local co-ops and restaurants, and Lancaster Farm Fresh even took her on as a member producer.

While ingenious to some, Vrapple was blasphemous to others. Cain remembers one year where she served over 1,000 samples at ScrappleFest, a once-annual event the Reading Terminal Market used to throw in honor of the pork mush. “There were some people who had some choice words for me,” Cain said. “‘Why would you mess with something like this?’ Like it was against law and nature.”

But when she moved back to her Northern California hometown of Vallejo, after nearly 20 years in Pennsylvania, she stopped producing it. How could she make it without the specially milled cornmeal or buckwheat flour from Lancaster County? Who on the West Coast would know about scrapple, let alone appreciate a riff on it?

Yet devoted Vrapple fans continued to reach out to Cain on social media, begging her to make it again. “I recently went down an internet rabbit hole and started seeing posts from people being like, ‘Where did Vrapple go?!’” she said. In Vallejo, Cain makes hand-painted, spirit-infused chocolates as Spirited Sweets Chocolates. In late 2023, caving to customer demand, she started tinkering with the Vrapple recipe again and served samples out of the commercial kitchen she shares with a local bakery.

As she quickly discovered, you don’t need to understand scrapple to like Vrapple. After nearly a decade out of the vegan scrapple game, Cain found that her new customers loved the high-protein vegan item, regardless of whether or not they’d heard of or ever tasted its organ-y counterpart.

“I’ve served it to several people who don’t know what scrapple is, who are meat eaters, and who really like it,” she said. “And the people who ate it who grew up on scrapple are amazed at how close it is to the real thing. There are surprisingly quite a few Pennsylvania expats on the West Coast.”

As Cain will tell you, she’s not the first – and certainly won’t be the last – scrapple innovator to fiddle around with a meat-free version. Long after she developed Vrapple, she discovered the work of William Woys Weaver, a food ethnographer and author from Devon, who wrote the definitive history of scrapple in his 2003 book, Country Scrapple, which included his own recipe for a vegetarian one. The internet is now littered with plant-based scrapple recipes, some using walnuts to mimic that pleasingly gritty mouthfeel, others employing chickpea flour and liquid smoke to maximize savoriness. Chef Omar Tate even serves a black eyed pea-based scrapple at his acclaimed West Philadelphia grocery and café, Honeysuckle Provisions.

“Scrapple evolved in ancient times as an adjunct to butchering, so it was by definition a meat-based porridge,” said Weaver. “Even with vegetarianism starting in colonial Philadelphia, there weren’t any attempts to make faux scrapple any more than attempting to make faux beef. People just ate something else instead. That said, during the 1920s and 1930s there were people experimenting with ideas like mushroom scrapple or seaweed scrapple, but none of those faux scrapples taste like scrapple made from pigs.”

According to the Farmers’ Almanac, German colonists in the Philadelphia area are likely to have invented the loaf as we’d recognize it today – also known as pon haus in the Pennsylvania Dutch – in the 17th or 18th century. The panfried delicacy made a filling, affordable protein source, capitalizing on unwanted pig scraps from the head, heart, liver, and skin that simmered with spices before forming loaves. According to food historian Denise Clemons in A Culinary History of Southern Delaware, the dish was initially served as a hot porridge on family farms that slaughtered pigs. “As commercial slaughterhouses appeared in some of the more densely populated urban areas,” Clemons writes, “scrapple became a by-product of the pork industry.”

After Cain, other vegetarian scrapples hit the market, including one from now-defunct Pennsylvania Dutch company Russian Pepper USA, which employed shiitake mushrooms and polenta for texture. “Gone is the heartburn; vanished is dubious ‘what’s in it?’ factor; and there’s not a squeal in sight,” the company said in its announcement.

Cain is now taking orders for Vrapple, which she’ll ship nationwide, through her website www.thevrapple.com. West Coasters can catch Cain selling Vrapple at Dillon Bread Company in Vallejo.

To prepare vegan scrapple at home and mimic the crispiness of the original, Cain recommends using a cast-iron pan – or a really good heavy one. “Put a little extra oil in the pain and then just fry the heck out of it until it’s a really beautiful dark brown.”