Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday Ned Deily reported on his Facebook page on a visit to the Farmer’s Market in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he found

maple-apple scrapple

for sale. A wonderful rhyming and /p/-ful compound, suitable for chanting or cheering.

For those of you not in the Pennsylvania Dutch area or close by, scrapple is, according to NOAD2:

scraps of pork or other meat stewed with cornmeal and shaped into loaves for slicing and frying, esp. characteristic of eastern Pennsylvania

The Wikipedia entry goes into a lot more detail (specifying “hog offal, such as the head, heart, liver, and other scraps” and fleshing out, as it were, the cooking procedure), which might well put you off the dish (as many people are put off by the somewhat similar  Scottish dish haggis, also inspired by the thrifty instinct to use whatever you can of the edible materials available to you).

Fried scrapple, part of a complete breakfast in the part of the world I grew up in, though scarcely part of a heart-healthy diet.

This entry was posted on May 8, 2010 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Language and food, Language play, Short shots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.