You can’t eat like a coal cracker if you don’t eat scrapple. What is scrapple? No one really knows for sure. It’s like a trade secret, although more of the Spam variety rather than the Coca Cola strain.
My best explanation has always been, “You know how people make jokes about what they put in hot dogs? Well, scrapple is made of the things that weren’t considered good enough for hot dogs. Plus, it’s gray. And you usually serve it for breakfast. And most people I know pour maple syrup on it.”
At least one, if not all, of these separate descriptions is often enough to send a person retching. The sum, of course, is even grosser than the parts. I recently read that the Food Channel tried to go on a tour of a scrapple plant and were not allowed to go into the actual processing area. I would just die to see someone in a scrapple plant dressed up like a Secret Service agent, shoving his hand in front of the camera lens saying, “Nothing to see here. Move along.” That, my friends, is the mystery that is scrapple.
My good friend V and I used to go back to the region rather frequently to do some music recording with my musical mentor, Larry Koch of the Braun School of Music in Gibbsville, and some others. V is a vegetarian. Lantanengo County is not the place to be a vegetarian.
We’d go out to eat (or he’d go out to watch me eat), and he’d ask me about local delicacies he’d see on the diner menus. Although he would never eat of them, he loved to talk about scrapple. It has that sort of car-wreck-on-the-side-of-the-highway appeal to it. Weird gray mystery meat.
Once while eating breakfast, two women in the booth across from ours asked the veteran waitress, “We’re from New York. What is this ‘scrapple’ I see here?” V and I had to stuff napkins in our mouths to keep from laughing. We couldn’t wait to hear the answer.
The waitress huffed and pondered the query for a moment. This wasn’t the kind of place where many tourists came, but those who did would most likely ask about scrapple more often than just about anything else on their breakfast menu.
“You don’t want that,” she explained. “Besides, it’s out of season.”
That was the point at which we both tumbled out of our booth and onto the floor. Meat, unlike fruits and vegetables, is not seasonal. But the waitress managed to keep the secret of scrapple alive, and for that, we coal crackers raise a Yuengling salute.
It’s SCRAPPLE; not SNAPPLE. One you drink; the other you … ask someone else to eat, then run.