7 Pennsylvania Fair Foods That Sound Wrong but Taste Right
Six Pennsylvania county fairs are running this week, from Wayne County in the Poconos to Tioga County near the New York state line.
Every one of them, and the fairs that follow later in the season, serves food whose name gets your order wrong before you’ve had a single bite.
These are the Pennsylvania fair foods that sound wrong but taste right.
Scrapple
Scrapple is a Pennsylvania fair food whose name does it zero favors.
You’re looking at a loaf of pork scraps, cornmeal, and spices, sliced thin and fried until the edges turn crisp and the inside stays soft.
Outsiders hear “scraps” and picture a mistake.
Wrong, every time.
Pennsylvania Dutch cooks have fried it up for generations.
Every Labor Day week, the Great Allentown Fair runs a scrapple eating contest, giving competitors two minutes to eat as much as they can for a shot at cash prizes.
The sandwich stands there still can’t keep up with the breakfast crowd.
Chicken Corn Soup With Rivels
Chicken Corn Soup With Rivels sounds like two separate problems stacked into one bowl.
Rivels are the strange part of the name.
The word sounds like loose hardware, not food, but rivels are just soft egg-and-flour dough, rubbed between the fingers into loose crumbs before they hit the pot.
Nothing metallic here.
They thicken the broth into something closer to a stew than a soup.
When the Solanco Fair opens in Quarryville each September, its food stand ladles this up as a Thursday special, right next to ham and bean soup and homemade chili.
Lebanon Bologna
Lebanon Bologna carries a name that undersells it badly.
“Bologna” makes many people picture flabby pink lunch meat between two slices of white bread.
Not this bologna.
Lebanon County smokehouses ferment and smoke this beef for days, until it turns dark, tangy, and almost jerky-firm.
Every summer, when the Lebanon Area Fair comes to town, volunteers who call themselves “Bologna Security” build a sandwich that runs 150 feet down the midway, using more than a thousand slices of Seltzer’s Lebanon Bologna.
Fairgoers eat it for free that same night, and few complain about the name once they’ve had a slice.
Cheese Curds
Cheese curds sound like cheese that already went bad.
Wrong idea entirely.
Fresh curds squeak against your teeth because they never sat long enough to melt into a solid block.
Once the Solanco Fair‘s Kettle Express stand opens for the season, it fries curds hot and salty, right next to fresh kettle corn.
The squeak is the whole point.
Shoofly Pie
Shoofly Pie sounds like it’s named after an insect problem in the kitchen.
No bugs involved.
What you get is a Pennsylvania Dutch crumb cake baked into a pie shell, its filling built from molasses, brown sugar, and water.
Bakers split it into two camps.
A dry-bottom slice sets firm all the way through, made for dunking in coffee, while a wet-bottom slice keeps a sticky, custard-like layer under the crumb top.
You’ll find it on bake-sale tables at fairs across Pennsylvania Dutch country all season, next to loaves of fresh bread and jars of chow chow.
Why Shoofly Pie Isn’t Named After Flies
Shoofly pie’s name has nothing to do with swatting insects off a sweet Pennsylvania Dutch filling, despite the story many people repeat.
The name traces back to Shoo-Fly Molasses, a brand once sold across Philadelphia.
That brand itself borrowed its name from a touring circus mule called Shoo-Fly, a small piece of 19th-century Pennsylvania trivia baked right into dessert.
Psst! How much do you know about Pennsylvania fair food history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Pennsylvania Fair Food IQ
Answer these questions on Pennsylvania fair food history. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Pennsylvania’s hard pretzel supposedly got its start because of what kitchen mishap?
Birch Beer
Birch Beer puts the word "beer" on a drink kids order by the gallon.
Not a drop.
It's entirely non-alcoholic, no matter what the label suggests.
It's a dark, herbal soda brewed from birch bark extract, and Pennsylvania Dutch families have poured it as a treat for generations.
Some Pennsylvania breweries trace their birch beer recipes back to Prohibition, when brewers pivoted to soft drinks just to stay in business.
A scoop of vanilla ice cream turns a bottle into a float at fair stands from the Poconos to Pittsburgh.
Few parents think twice before ordering one for their own kids.
Whoopie Pie
Whoopie Pie sounds more like a party favor than a fair food.
You get two soft rounds of chocolate cake, held together with a thick layer of sweet cream filling.
No confetti anywhere.
The Butler Farm Show, running this week through August 15, holds its own Baked Goods Auction on opening night, where 4-H members and adult bakers alike put their best whoopie pies and other treats up for bid.
Grange and community fair bake tables across Pennsylvania Dutch country sell them all season too, right alongside shoofly pie and fresh bread.
Bakeries in Lancaster County stock dozens of flavors beyond plain chocolate, from pumpkin to red velvet, especially once fair season slides into harvest time.
A whoopie pie eaten warm off a fair table beats a gas-station version every time.
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