Originally Posted by DaDOKin DC
the first German-American community in the US was in "Germantown", founded in 1683, and now a part of Philadelphia... The 'cuisine' known as PA Dutch, including scrapple, did not become popularized until the 18th C., when the area was well-established. But the origins of the people, and presumably their cuisine, reach back to the original settlement.
So, Grasshopper, you attempt to enter the mysterious discipline of history?
Scrapple, in fact, was invented in the Lower Rhine village of Schweinkuss in 1653 by Franz Doppelganger, the local idiot, who had nothing better to do.
A few years later, having been shunned by his neighbors for a rather scandalous incident involving his minister's yak and an elder's berry bush, Doppelganger emigrated to Pennsylvania. Then he immigrated to Pennsylvania -- just to prove he could do it both ways.
He first attempted to peddle scrapple to tourists in New Hope (Bucks County) but was thwarted by the fact that the town had not yet been founded.
Never one to give up, Doppelganger put his scrapple leftovers (of which there were always a great amount as nobody wanted to eat it) into tubes, declared them to be "hot dogs", and tried to make his fortune by selling them to people waiting for the Phillies to start playing major league ball.
(Indeed, to this very day there are people waiting for the Phillies to start playing major league ball.)
Needless to say, hot dogs were an immediate failure, which made them the ideal official food of the Phillies. However, Doppelganger was able to scrape out a living by selling hot pretzels covered with mustard and later became rich by replacing that condiment with Cholula Hot Sauce
as shown in this thread.
Originally Posted by DaDOKin DC
My undergraduate was at St Joseph's Univ '81.
I have always loved their aspirin.