The Cuisine of Eastern Pennsylvania

This is an old post from our trip out to Eastern PA in February. I wrote up this post about the foods we encountered there, but just forgot to post it. So here goes...

A couple weekends ago we traveled to Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania for a family reunion on Beth's mom's side. You can read more about the weekend here. While there, we got to sample many of the unique foods of eastern Pennsylvania. It's a great example of some of the many regional varieties of food in America. Much of this food springs from the strong German heritage of the area. So we present to you some of the highlights...


1. Pickled Beat Eggs - these are eggs soaked with beets and sugar. Often found jarred. Some varieties are more salty. Grammie's are sweeter.


2. Tomato Pie - essentially a cold pizza with no cheese or toppings. Quite good.


3. Now, a pasta salad like this isn't necessarily native to Eastern PA, but these salads by Cousin Verl are really, really good. This shell pasta salad is supposedly Pop-Pop's favorite, and I can see why.


4. Shoo-Fly Pie - a pie with a bottom layer made with molasses. And we're told this is a wet-bottomed version.


5. And the piece de resistance: Scrapple - this is a meat dish made from the scraps (hence the name) of meat left over at the butcher, mixed with corn meal and fried. It's crispy on the outside, mealy on the inside, and really not that bad tasting. But I think knowing what it's made of doesn't help.

The only thing we didn't get a picture of was the Lebanon Baloney, which is a dense, smoky, spicy sausage named after Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. It reminds me of the summer sausage my family gets from Miesfeld's in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.