Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

For more than a century and a half, The New York Times has been recording the pleasures and prejudices of the American palate. “The Way We Ate” is a weekly tasting menu of vintage food writing from The Times’s archives.

In the winter of 1872, the Letters page of The New York Times was briefly invaded by scrapple.

It all started with one reader’s paean to his favorite breakfast food. Calling himself “EPICURE,” he pronounced the dish—a Spam-like slab of cornmeal and pig parts—both delicious and inexpensive. If anyone was interested, he continued, he’d be delighted to share his good lady’s recipe.

Two days later, at the urging of several readers, the recipe ran.

Over the next two weeks, The Times published more than two dozen letters on the subject of scrapple, which, taken together, form a sort of steampunk prototype for online food discussion. It’s all there: the pseudonymous “usernames,” the off-topic ranting, the preoccupation with pork fat. In short, it’s a modern-day food thread in very slow motion.

In thoroughly modern fashion, EPICURE’s recipe was almost immediately wikified. PORCUPINE warned against over-frying the scrapple, A HOUSEKEEPER swapped in Graham flour, and MIDDLETOWN gave her method for removing excess grease.

Only PHYSICIAN seemed content with the dish as it was, calling it “a positive luxury, throwing the Frenchman’s pâté de foie gras entirely into the shade.”

As always, the haters far outnumbered the fans: One reader declared that he’d just as soon fry bread in lard and eat it than partake in what others called an “abominable mess,” a “culinary fraud upon the stomach” and a great way to contract trichinosis.

Participants in the discussion didn’t just object to scrapple, of course. They also objected to each other. In what may be the earliest recorded example of a “flame,” H.G. punned on A GOOD LIVER’s pen-name, suggesting that he be “boiled and chopped up” for his ignorance.

By the fifth day, most letters paid only lip service to scrapple. The frugal nature of the dish became an opportunity to hold forth on everything from the rising cost of living to women’s ruinous spending habits. As X. Y. Z. saw it, at the heart of the “great scrapple correspondence” lay the central question of the nineteenth century: “How shall the middle classes live?”

Before that question was ever answered, the thread came to an abrupt halt with this provocative rant:

To the Editor of the New-York Times: Let a few of your economists try the following recipe and they will find it is all it is cracked up to be: Take a calf’s left hind leg and let it hang until it will just stay hung without falling, then take it down, after cutting the bone out chop the meat into pieces about the size of a walnut, put them on the roof in a rain-storm for twenty-four hours, after which (if a cat don’t get them) boil with a pound of licorice-root, let the lot gently simmer for a few minutes and then add a paper of Lorillard’s century tobacco with a little old rye whisky, and you will have the meanest mess under the sun except scrapple. ANTI-SCRAPPLE

We’ll never know whether the tirade killed the thread or the editors did. Then, as now, board moderators answered to no one.

As no message board veteran can fail to note, the technology has evolved, but our behavior has not.