Don Firth: You're right; scrapple doesn't look or taste at all like Spam.

As for the taste of scrapple: some scrapple is absolutely heavenly, and some is absolutely horrible. It depends a lot on the spices used. There's one local brand here in Pennsylvania called "Hatfield" (the meat-packing plant is in the town of Hatfield, but I don't know if the company is named after the town or after the family for whom the town is named); it's pretty highly flavored, and is my personal favorite. Yum!! I, too, eat it only once in a while, as a treat (and I do mean treat!).

A couple of years ago, I had a co-worker whose parents run a farm upstate. I mentioned that I love scrapple, at which my co-worker recoiled and talked a bit about the scrapple-processing done by her folks. She brought me a sample brick to take home and try... and it was just god-awful, fatty stuff with no flavor whatsoever. No wonder she hates it! I didn't have the heart to tell her that I hated it, too, but I never asked her for her family's scrapple again!

By the way, although some folks simply fry the square that they've sliced off the scrapple brick, others – like my family – scramble it in the pan as it fries. I think it tastes a bit lighter this way; certainly the texture is less dense.

One of the local Philadelphia radio stations held a "Scrapple-Fest" for a couple of years, and put out a CD of songs written by local performers on the subject, called "Scrapple Rocks". Alas, the radio station has changed its format and has fired the scrapple-loving host of the Fest, but scrapple still rocks!