Pancake

Shrove Tuesday on the Eastern Shore

Standard
English: Scrapple, served in a restaurant.

Scrapple! (Image via Wikipedia)

Yes, today is Shrove Tuesday, also known as Fat Tuesday for you Mardi Gras  aficionados, and if you live on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, you can’t turn around without bumping into a pancake supper somewhere.

Maybe you have the same tradition? Elsewhere my family has had meager meals of bread and simple soup for Shrove Tuesday, but here in the heartland of Eastern Mid-Atlantic America (just coined that, like it?) it’s pancakes with all the trimmings. Which brings us to the point of this post.

 

Scrapple.

 

Trimmings. get it? Okay, for those uninitiated in the culinary compilation called scrapple, let me just say that it is the trimmings and scraps of pork that didn’t make it into a chop or loin. Probably not even into a hot dog. We jokingly say “It’s the rest of the pig.” And we may not be far off.

 

It’s a special treat here, and after a few years of living on The Shore, today I had my first sample. It was perfectly rectangular (which should have been a dead giveaway that this was not a naturally occurring edible) and it was fried. Fried hard. Double, maybe triple fried.

 

But it tasted pretty darned good! Of course, maybe it was the maple syrup I poured on it, but regardless – now I can say with pride:

 

I have eaten scrapple and lived to tell the tail tale!

 

Scrapple. Try it sometime!  (with maple syrup <insert smiley face here>)

 

Photo Credit: (Scrapple, served in a restaurant. Photo courtesy of [http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/133253118/ Stu Spivack] {{cc-by-sa-2.0}}

 

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