Scrapple: Making A Local Delicacy

- From a dinner speech in 1906

Pigs.

Squealin' before the slaughter. Their breakfast-plate fate. Soon they will be scrapple. Or a hot dog at the ball park. Maybe ham hocks for soup base.

Chitterlings, anyone?

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.

Christian butchers - gourmet scrapple chefs transforming hogs into haute cuisine - slaughter, dismember, grind, process, cure, cook, slice and package the 30,000 oinkers that become meat for the eating every week at Hatfield Quality Meats Inc.'s massive pork and beef processing plant on Funks Road.

Where the pigs are.

Oink-oink.

Visitors don't need a street sign to find Funks Road. There's been a ''Hatfield Quality Meats" or a "Hatfield Packaging Company" or a ''Pleasant Valley Packing Company" sign where the road begins since 1895. And the company has grown to become the largest meat-processing plant on the East Coast, according to USDA officials.

The sprawling, 563,580-square-foot plant is far from homes and stretches as far as the eye can see.

The place is described by content employees as an institution where Mennonite traditions have long been established, according to Alan Oser, the director of quality control, the guy who knows most every nook and cranny of the operation.

Or ask Mel Landis, the Mennonite whom Oser calls the "scrapplemaster," the guy who has been making Philadelphia's unique breakfast meat professionally for 38 of his 59 years "because my father and grandfather and great-grandfather made scrapple. I had a natural into it, I guess."

No ordinary meat-packing factory, this.

For most of the 980 employees at this plant, it's been "a natural into" their jobs as well.

"We got a lot of Delps, a lot of Freeders," said John W. Clemens, the CEO and grandson of the company's founder, John S. Clemens Sr. "We got a lot of Clemens, too."

Indeed. The roster of Hatfield executives easily could double as a Clemens family tree, a lineage that includes Samuel Clemens, a k a Mark Twain.

There is John W. Clemens, the boss. Among those on the board of directors are Clair W. Clemens, Abram S. Clemens, Ezra S. Clemens, John S. Clemens Jr., Kenneth W. Clemens and Lester S. Clemens.

On the executive committee, there are other members of the Clemens family. Philip A. Clemens is the vice president of human resources, and Richard L. Clemens is the vice president overseeing the cut, kill and rendering of the hogs.

Clemens, Clemens everywhere.

Read the Hatfield Packing Co. Philosophy of Business Objective No. 3 and it becomes clear why the Clemenses and other families stay at Hatfield.

"Maintain and apply Christian principles in all our customer, employee and vendor relationships."

And you won't find objective No. 4 hanging on many corporate boardroom walls:

"To support our community through financial contributions, environmental concerns and extend a helping hand whenever possible."

To Oser, getting a job at Hatfield after college meant more than bringing home the bacon.

As Oser tells it, the job also meant leaving behind Judaism for his ''salvation."

"In January 1973, I accepted Christ as my savior," Oser said in the corporate conference room, where a King James Bible was open to the 22d Psalm within reach of the executive committee's table. "My life hasn't been the same since."

*

Some Philadelphians' lives wouldn't be the same without scrapple at the crack of dawn.

Its origins are somewhat sketchy, but the folks at Hatfield say they know Pennsylvania Dutch farmers adopted the pot pudding recipes of northern Germany. It was called Panhaus in Germany, and in the Philadephia region it was a mix of pork scraps cooked in broth and thickened with cornmeal.

The company goes to great lengths to assure its customers that scrapple is made of only the finest pork products.

"One fallacy about scrapple is that it's made out of scrap - and it isn't," Oser said.

Oser said what you see on the label is what you get: pork stock, pork snouts, pork livers, yellow corn meal, whole wheat flour, pork skins, pork, pork heart, pork tongue, salt, spices and flavoring.

Oser walked over to a few of the bins in the large, orderly, refrigerated room where some of the scrapple ingredients are kept.

The other bins contained parts that Hatfield doesn't put in scrapple.

"These," he said, pointing to some cleaned viscera, "the USDA classifies as skeletal cuts of meat, whole muscle like stomachs, eyeballs, the intestines, the brains. And to use products like that for any kind of pork item, it has to be on the label."

Oser walked across the hallway and entered an adjacent room. This was the realm of Scrapplemaster Landis.

Three vats were boiling the attendant scrapple parts - some liver here, a few hearts there. In another vat, there was the broth, simmering slowly, being readied for introduction to the mix.

Everything from the pork snout to the pork skin is cooked before Landis puts the final touches on the product.

"Scrapple, you see, is an extremely thoroughly cooked product," Oser said.

Landis couldn't agree more.

He took work at the Hatfield plant four years ago after his previous employer, Grabram's Meats in Harleysville, shut its doors. He'd been cooking there for 34 years.

Here's one cook who eats his product - and will easily speak the scrapple evangel.

"I always tell people it's no preservatives, nothing artificial," he said, in the way a true believer defends his faith.

"It's good stuff and that's what people are after these days," he said. ''But when they made scrapple years ago, they used everything they had left. Can't do that anymore, ya know."

Landis' two sons used to make scrapple with him at the Grabram's plant - until they went to college.

"Well, they still like scrapple," said Landis. "They just don't make it anymore."

"The end of a tradition here," said Oser, hovering in the background near the boiling livers. "Scrapple's a toughie. It could disappear in the next 20 years. It doesn't fit into a lot of lifestyles."

The shame of that, Oser and Landis say, is that scrapple is the most nutritious product consumers can buy from Hatfield - healthier than that hot dog at the ballpark, more wholesome than Easter ham.

Scrapple doesn't fit into the health generation's lifestyle because fried food has a reputation as being bad for you - and scrapple is not the same unless it's fried.

The faint of heart should not walk into what Oser and other employees call Hatfield's "kill floor." Even dedicated scrapple addicts and ham fanatics might stop eating the stuff after they see the first step in the process.

It's not pretty. To animal rights advocates, it's barbaric. But at Hatfield, it is necessary.

It is at the kill floor where hogs are slaughtered with an electronic probe, hung by a hoof on a hook with blood dripping from their snouts, and swung round a moving carousel into scalding water where they are dipped and dehaired.

Hatfield takes great pains to ensure that before the hogs are butchered they're as clean as possible.

They are singed with flamethrowing rods.

They are hand-shaven with a straight edge.

And then, unmercifully, they are dismembered.

The carcass is slit in half.

This currently happens to 500 pigs per hour, 18 hours a day at Hatfield.

Their breakfast-plate fate. A hot dog at the ballpark. Ham hocks for soup base.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, hair net shaping a coif that hangs down the back of her shoulders, Susan Greaser placed the scrapple bricks in the appropriate pockets after her sister-in-law, Nancy Welby, made sure they were the appropriate weight.

This is as far away from the kill floor as an employee can get.

The one-pound "bricks" came at Welby quickly, and with quick hands she rolled them onto the calibrated electronic scale.

The red digits flashed the weight, in grams, about once a second.

477 . . . 484 . . . 511 . . . 455 . . . 496 . . . 515.

Greaser, from Sellersville, started working at the plant when she was in high school. She's a seven-year veteran of scrapple wrapping now.

Her mother works at the plant. So do her two brothers-in-law Neil and Jamie Welby. And her husband, John. Her sister-in-law works an arm's length away

from her.

And last Thursday was a special event. They happen frequently during the year for Hatfield employees.

"Today's my birthday," said Greaser. "I'm 24."

"That means she gets a free lunch on the company," Oser quickly shot back.

"It's called a pig-out," said Greaser.

Lunch in the company cafeteria for Hatfield employees costs $1.50, the same price it has been for six years. Before that it was $1. A can of Coke anywhere at the plant costs 35 cents. Lunch is usually between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. The workday for most plant employees starts at 5:30 a.m.

Oser joined others in the cafeteria for a break and talked about his wife and Jesus Christ and how he found both amongst the slaughtered, gutted, sliced, ground, cooked and cured pigs at Hatfield.

Oser's unfamiliarity with evangelical Christianity was understandable. After all, Oser was raised in Levittown, just down the road from his family's synagogue but far from the Amish culture, far from "the plain folk" - a culture that was as unfamiliar to him as Babylonia.

"For 2 1/2 years I just studied these people and thought, 'What the heck are these people about?' " he said. "I couldn't figure it out. They had bonnets on their head."

But then, after he was assigned to set up a laboratory at Hatfield, things began to change.

"My assistant was a fundamentalist separatist Baptist," Oser said. "I learned what salvation was."

Within six months, Oser said, "She had this concern for my soul that I didn't have."

Oser was at first skeptical with all the Jesustalk. After all, he was interested in running his lab experiments and punching the clock before he left. Eventually, Oser had a change of heart.

In January 1973, he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.

"Before that, we couldn't agree on anything," Oser said about his once- peculiar assistant. "After I accepted Christ as my savior, we didn't have anything to disagree about."

On May 26, 1973, Oser and his assistant, the former Helen Michael, were married.

The people at Hatfield were not surprised. As a matter of fact, such developments are commonplace.

"There's quite a few Gospel-believing, Bible-believing people here," he said. "You don't hear a lot of swearing, cussing and cursing around here. . . . There is a Christian flavor to this company and it goes through to the products."