Some regional favorites break their boundaries. Take Buffalo wings, for example, or New England clam chowder and eastern Carolina-style pulled pork.

Other dishes remain acquired tastes – misunderstood at best, but more often reviled by the uninitiated.

Scrapple is in this group, considered by many to be synonymous with haggis, head cheese and other creations from the generations when nothing went to waste. The dish is rarely seen outside of its native mid-Atlantic habitat. And when a chef dares to put it on a menu, scrapple is often disguised by sleight of semantics.

Rumor has it that the dish has appeared under the guise of grilled polenta or rustic country pate at restaurants outside of eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware. But the crew at Taste of Philly in Bowling Green have the gall to call it what it is: scrapple, in all its corn mush, pork meat glory.

“It’s not something that’s taken off,” admits Taste of Philly chef Adam Wacker. “But if they’ve had it, people come back for it.”

The scrapple at Taste of Philly is a rich pudding, studded with ruddy meat and turned on the flat top to create a crispy veneer. The patty of corn meal, herbs and spices dissolves gently on the palate, leaving a comforting blanket of natural sweetness leavened by hints of grass and mellow earthiness.

Within this plush cushion are crusty bits of pork with a lean minerality and calm nutty savor. Crisping the whole on a grill lends a waft of smoke and the enigmatic character imparted by well worn iron.

Two runny eggs arrayed on top bring a cashmere warmth to the presentation. It’s rustic and filling, but prepared with a deft hand.

Wacker developed the recipe by testing and adapting several east coast variations. He sources the meat locally, relying on Boston butt – the shoulder – and other bits which he won’t divulge.

“I don’t want to give away all the secrets,” he said. “But it’s labor intensive.”

The “bits” and the name have long caused first timers to be cautious around scrapple. But the dish has been part of the American experience since colonial times. Historians trace the dish to the 1500s in Germany, where buckwheat was mixed with pork scraps to create a loose pudding known as panhas.

Scrapple’s regional boundaries were formed by European settlement patterns. Quakers and other sects known for modesty and frugality settled in what became Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. They placed a value on using all that was given them. So bits of pork that did not make it into sausage or could not be cured found their way into scrapple.

So scrapple became associated with offal. And the name, at least according to the author of Country Scrapple, William Woys Weaver, the name is a conflation of panhaskroppel – German for “a cut of panhas” – and the less appealing English term for leftover scraps.

Yet as Wacker’s recipe at A Taste of Philly in Bowling Green attests, there is no rule that limits scrapple to organ meats. Indeed, Wacker starts his scrapple by braising the meat low and slow, giving the dish some care.

Philadelphia is known for another dish, the cheesesteak. It’s a best seller at A Taste of Philly. But given its heritage, scrapple is a dish for the ages.