Scrapple (1848)

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 11/17/2002 3:19:15 PM Eastern Standard Time,
Bapopik at AOL.COM writes:

>  There were plates of coarse dough-nuts, crullers, and waffles, all
children
> of the same family. Also, hogs-head cheese, smeer-case and scrapple;
> cucumbers pickled yellow, and cabbage pickled purple; a saucer of large
black
> lumps, which were quinces, preserved hard; and another of small black ...

Apparently the writer you quote used semicolons to segregate classes of
foods, e.g. pickled cucumbers and pickled cabbage are lumped together.
Therefore the writer appears to list "hogs-head cheese, smeer-case and
scrapple" as similar foods.  "Smeer-case" is a slight mangling of the German
for cottage cheese.  I cannot identify "hogs-head cheese"---conceivably it is
"head cheese" which is a jellied loaf made from various leftover parts of
pork including the snout, but I suspect it is some local term for something
ordinary like Cheddar.

Hence the writer appears to consider hogs-head cheese, cottage cheese, and
something called "scrapple" to constitute a category of food and to be as
closely related at two kinds of pickled vegetables.  This leads to the
question: is it safe to assume that this writer used "scrapple" in the modern
sense of a loaf made from corn meal and ground meat, or does he use
"scrapple" to mean some unidentified dairy product?

     - Jim Landau