One imaginative Amish woman with a large family to feed found a way to avoid the risk of serving a dry turkey to her brood. “I stuff a duck inside a turkey. That makes the turkey more moist and the duck seem less greasy. They both brown well and you can mix the two meats when you serve them!”

Bread crusts or stale bread is not a problem to the resourceful Amish cook. Said one, “I just turn the crust to the inside when I’m making sandwiches and it doesn’t make a difference to anyone!” But when bread passes its prime for eating as fresh slices, it is often dried to a crisp, then rolled into bread crumbs, or cubed and fashioned into Bread Filling. A watchful cook can make this successfully on top of the stove. In fact, as one experienced Amish woman explained, “You don’t even need gravy with it if you have it real moist.” The dish is less likely to scorch, however, if it is baked in the oven.

Twenty-pound slabs of fresh beef were regularly dried at butchering time. The dry salt curing, followed by smoking, and finally, the meat’s hanging undisturbed for six weeks, resulted in a pungently strong beef for sandwiches and dried beef gravy. Traditionally the meat was chipped off the chunk in thin slices.

Those German immigrants who settled in eastern Pennsylvania did not invent sausage. They developed their taste for the robust meat in Germany, but found it translated well to the New World where they could still grow hogs and do their own butchering. Sausage was, and is, eaten both smoked and fresh. The fresh variety was either cooked and canned for future use or buried under fat in crocks kept in the cool cellar for more immediate use. Smoked sausage, after being smoked, hung in the attic, offering its spicy flavor throughout the winter. Both varieties were commonly prepared by browning the pieces and serving them with potatoes.

Butchering yielded rich meat scraps, too flavorful to give to the animals or simply throw away. Scrapple, however, was not invented in Pennsylvania. It most likely came with settlers from the lower Rhine area of Germany to Philadelphia. So it was in this country that the Amish learned to make the dish. Two ingredients distinguish the dish—buckwheat and cornmeal (a New World addition), which act as extenders and provide a distinctive flavor.