Scrapple

PIANO SUMMIT, featuring Kenny Barron, Tommy Flanagan, Shirley Scott. 7:30 p.m. Feb. 13, WHYY Forum Theater, 6th and Arch streets. $18.50. Info: 215-636-1666. He's got some family and pleasant memories here, but Kenny Barron won't be returning to his native Philadelphia to stay. "New York is so different," Barron said. "I can go out any night of the week and go to eight or nine major jazz clubs. " Barron, 53, who will be performing with his trio Thursday at the WHYY Forum Theater, learned much during his early years in Philadelphia.

Scrapple must be the ultimate mystery meat. "What's in this?" I asked 30 years ago at my first breakfast in Philadelphia. "You don't want to know. Just eat it," said the future father of my children. And so I did. Yum. Thirty years later, a vague "pig stuff" is all I want to know about what's in scrapple, a local staple for more than 130 years. In the interests of accuracy and education, it could be time to help your kids get the facts straight. The Howell Living History Farm plans to do that on Saturday during four hours of bacon-, sausage- and, yes, scrapple-making.

The Trocadero is always a busy place, but this week it's ridiculous. There's a noteworthy show happening nearly every night at the Chinatown venue. On Saturday, it's an oddball bill with Juliana Hatfield and Jeff Buckley. Hatfield's a formidable songwriter, but her little-girl voice and crunchy guitar begins to wear on Only Everything (Mammoth/Atlantic). She hasn't hit the sweet spot with an album's worth of tunes since 1992's Hey Babe. It'll be fascinating to see what her teeny-bopper fans think of Buckley, whose lushly romantic croon, Robert Plant wail and unabashed indulgence made last year's Grace an oft-brilliant, oft-difficult listen.

On Mondays, John Ferroni makes sausage in his small shop at the intersection of Routes 841 and 41 in the village of Chatham in London Grove Township. On Tuesdays, he makes scrapple. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, he delivers his products to stores and other outlets. Villagers know, however, that they also can stop into his well-worn shop, marked only with a pink flag that has a pig on it, to buy some of the scrapple or sausage that has been a Ferroni family tradition since the late 1880s.

Spam keeps bringing home the bacon. The food product carried by GIs at D-Day is today experiencing double-digit growth, according to Hormel, the company based in Austin, Minn., that packs it. America's best-known canned meat, whose name comes from "spiced pork and ham," is still marching to destinations around the world. But if Spam has survived as a staple for millions of Americans since being introduced in 1937, the "Miracle Meat" had its best years in the 1950s and 1960s.

The palest of morning suns is just over the hump of Tussey Mountain. Gales of snow are whipping across the country lane in the subzero temperature. And the tattered green farmhouse is dripping with two-foot icicles. But clouds of steam already are piling into the frigid air from the outdoor scalding trough and the cast-iron cooking kettles. A dozen cars are crammed in the snow just beyond Herb Rudy's barn. And Rudy, with his knife, and Jake Wheeland, with his .22 rifle, are up in the pig pen trying to corner another pig. Here in the frost-bound valley between Tussey and Bald Eagle Mountains, in the frozen heart of a central Pennsylvania winter, the 137-acre Rudy farm is alive this morning with friends and relations, with corny jokes and spat tobacco juice, with steaming cinnamon rolls and sawed-up hogs.

When Sean McDonough and Tim McCarver discussed the ingredients of Philadelphia scrapple during a telecast of the National League Championship Series, they inadvertently threw the audience a curve that would have made even Jim Bunning jealous. "Intestines," said McDonough. Yes, McCarver concurred. And then, wounded Philadelphia scrapple-ites let out a hog squeal of hurt, followed by shipments of scrapple to CBS in New York along with details on how it was really made. Scrapple lovers were determined to set the record straight.

At that marvelous moment of ultimate elation at 11:17 Wednesday night - when Braves pinch hitter Bill Pecota got the bad idea of going after that high fastball from Mitch Williams (and missed) - did you stop for just a moment to reflect on how awful all those fans in Atlanta must have been feeling at the exact same second? I know I didn't, but a day or so after the final victory of the Rustbelt Ruffians over the Sunbelt Smoothies, I did one of my favorite things: I looked up the accounts of the games as they had appeared in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

By the end, they were doing the Philly chop, elbows bending a bit vengefully in the echoing, joyous, eye-rubbing rows of the Vet. Not only had these Phillies not collapsed. They'd brought a scrappy, disheveled dignity to a National League pennant win, silencing that dopey chatter on CBS about how scrapple is made, putting a whole new, beautiful spin on October in Philadelphia. Pardon the sports-as-metaphor-for-municipal-life bit. But there has seemed something appropriate about these 1993 Phils, these castoffs, underdogs, Rodney Dangerfields, climbing out of last year's basement to this year's pinnacle (almost)

Tim McCarver heard the complainers yesterday on WIP-AM. The callers thought McCarver and play-by-play man Sean McDonough were anti-Phillies during CBS's telecast of Game 1 of the National League Championship Series. McCarver laughed yesterday, as I did. Were these people watching the same game I was, the game the Phillies won, 4-3, in 10 innings? "I did an article for the Atlanta Constitution (Wednesday) night before the game about anti-Atlanta (sentiments)," McCarver said, pausing in his detailed preparation for Game 2 in the CBS broadcast booth at Veterans Stadium.