Hanover native Andrew Little took the family dishes of his childhood in central Pennsylvania to his job as head chef at a fine dining restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee.

The former Sheppard Mansion executive chef was featured in a Nov. 12 article in the Wall Street Journal about mid-Atlantic cuisine for his culinary twists on old Pennsylvania Dutch foods like shoo-fly pie and soft pretzels. Little is now the chef at Josephine's on 12th in Nashville and frequently integrates Keystone State classics into his menu.

Little spoke Friday of his success in the south and, more importantly, how to make the perfect hog maw.

Q: Tell me about how you got into the culinary arts.

Little: I grew up in Hanover and went to Hanover High School. I then went to James Madison University for music. I worked for an actuarial consulting firm for a while in Baltimore. After that I enrolled at York College to get teaching certification. During that time I worked at Hanover Country Club and worked as a chef to pay for the teaching certification.

I was in my early 20s and didn't know what I wanted to do. Both of my parents were teachers, so it felt like being a teacher was kind of the family business. Once I started working at the country club, I realized that was pretty interesting to me. My schedule as a musician was weekends and nights, so restaurant wasn't that much of a change in lifestyle. I enjoyed the speed and aspects of being in a kitchen.

I worked there for a while before I went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park in New York in 2002. And from there I went and worked at the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia. Then my first actual chef job was north of Philadelphia. When the opportunity came to cook at the Sheppard Mansion, I took it and worked there from 2006 to 2012.

Q: How did you learn to make traditional Pennsylvania Dutch meals?

Little: Growing up in the area, it's kind of just what we ate. When I left Hanover and was in Virginia and New York, I didn't think I was ever going to come back. But when I did, I was more mature as a cook and as a person. It really opened my eyes to the opportunity and position to take foods I grew up with and re-imagine them in a modern fine dining restaurant.

I feel really lucky. I was at the right time and right place to go back and take a fresh look at some of these things. It's also the way the food industry was moving in general. People are looking more at local foods and ingredient. People are starting to look at the foods of their family and heritage and cherish them.

When my wife and I moved back, we lived 300 yards away from house I grew up in. That's something that a lot of people don't have. To have the ability to talk to my parents and say that I'm trying this dish out because it was something we had around the table at the holidays and I want to see if I'm on the right track, that was an opportunity that I feel very thankful for.

Q: What is your process for creating dishes at the restaurant where you work now?

Little: First thing we do is look at the season and the availability of products we have and go from there. We try to figure out what we think people want to eat and consider interesting techniques and styles.

I take a lot of time writing in notebooks and look at old notes for ideas. I look to more of my background and foods I grew up with to see if we can be inspired by those.

Scrapple is on our dinner menu right now. That is a signature item here. Nashville has a fried chicken basted in peppers that it's known for. What we've done is cooked scrapple in the baste for the Nashville hot chicken so it's a direct line form Nashville to central Pennsylvania. The roots and the fundamentals of my culinary upbringing come through in the menu. Thankfully, it's been popular and successful.

Q: So what's your secret for making the perfect hog maw?

Little: So I think the first thing is -- and it's something I wish and hope everyone realizes how lucky they are to have -- is to go to one of those really great small butchers all around. It's something we don't have and struggle with in Nashville. In Hanover you could drive 20 minutes in any direction and find a butcher with access to the different parts.

You need a really good stomach. We soak it in buttermilk, which pulls out any gaminess and helps to tenderize it, because there is muscle in the stomach. Then rinse it. It's really important to make sure it's dry before you stuff it. One trick is to go to Staples and get one of those cans of compressed air you use to clean the keyboard. You can use that to make sure the stomach really dries it out. To me the perfect hog maw has a really crispy, crackly exterior. If it's not dried, it's just going to steam.

For the stuffing, go back to the small butchers to find great ground pork. Include some potatoes. I also like a lot of thyme, sage and a lot of black pepper. Once you get it tied up, let it rest a little in the fridge before you go to roast it, it just needs to be really dry so that will help dry it out more. Even handling it with your hands is going to add to the moisture on outside.

For when you're cooking, putting it on a roasting rack over a roasting pan is important. One step that is crucial is every 20 minutes, pull it out and baste it. The fat that comes out, you can baste with it and it will add to the sheen and make it super crispy.

The hardest part of all of it is when you are done cooking you have to let it sit. Wrap it with aluminum and poke holes to let steam out. Let it cool and relax a little. Then come back and slice it up. Hog maw makes a super great afternoon lunch or supper.

Q: What was the best part of your time as a chef in Hanover?

Little:  I think that the thing that I've mentioned before, the opportunity. For the Sheppard family to have the idea and be ahead of the curve with local cuisine in a restaurant that has a farm and garden in 2006, there were just a couple places doing that.

I continue to go back to how thankful I am to have had that time in Hanover to reconnect with it. If that had not happened, I wouldn't have had the time to really dip back into the stuff I grew up with. That's just what we had when I was little. Food of the mid-Atlantic is a really broad term, but to see people start to celebrate it is great. It's an iconic regional American cuisine and it deserves a little time in the spot light.

If I can do that, that really makes me happy. To be able to be a cheerleader for the place you grew up is the greatest thing in the world. I will walk through the dining room tonight and talk to people who have never heard of the scrapple. But there's a possibility that they'll be turned on to it and see central Pennsylvania as having a rich food tradition.

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