Let's make some hamburger gravy on toast for supper. You get a cube (well, a rectangle) of hamburger out of the freezer, and start browning the frozen meat. Pretty soon, you turn it over, and "peel" the browned meat off the top with your burger turner, while the bottom browns, every 30 seconds, you repeast that, until it's all melted sand semi browned. You break up those "peelings" until you have piueces about the size of a pea or lima bean (or smaller), and continue to brown the meat, stirring it constantly. When it's almost done browning, you add a couple of spoons of flour to some milk, and stir it up until there aren't any lumps, then you drizzle the flour/milk into the browning burger, adding salt and pepper, and adding more milk as necessary, to get the right viscosity, then you ladle it over hot buttered toast and immediately the plate's owner starts digging in.
Or suppose you just want some bulk sausage you can toss on a frozen pizza, so you don't bother making gravy, you just strain the sausage and save it in a jar in the frigidaire.
Mom always talked of scrabbling up some ground meat, as the start of making something, but I don';t know as how I've ever heard anyone outside out family use that phrase, nor, for that matter, any other. That definition of scrabble isn't found in the dictionaries I've checked.
So what's the accepted phrase to use for turning raw ground meat into loose browned meat?
My guess is that it's a variation on "scramble up the meat." "Scrabble up the meat" rolls off the tongue a bit more quickly, and there's plenty of other examples of idioms that are based on saying things more quickly and/or efficiently and/or humorously.
I say that's my "best guess" since we always had "scrambled eggs" rather than "scrabbled eggs" (which I've never heard). But that was in Wisconsin.
Scrambling an egg is mixing up the egg and yolk, so they are equally distributed, just as piring a deck scrambles the Hollerith cards. You're not mixing up the hamburger or sausage; the meat grinder already did that. You're simply milling the meat into smaller chunks, like a sbiw cone machine pulverizes ice. But you wouldn't put lightly-browned hamburger into a hammer mill, because it's not friable.
Got a suggestion for a concise verb that could, for instance, be used over and over in a cookbook? If there is a term for "sweating" onions, for "reducing" a sauce, or for "deglazing" a pan, there ought to be a term for this.
deaconB said
So what's the accepted phrase to use for turning raw ground meat into loose browned meat?
In some parts of the upper Midwest, Maid-Rite might be the accepted phrase.
Thanks, but Maid-Rite isn't a verb, it's a noun - the trademark for a restaurant, and for its sandwich, although the sandwich uses scrabbled-up beef. But Skyline 3/4/5-ways are also made from scrabbled-up meat (although it's scrabbled up finer).