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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.
My wife grew up in northern Indiana in the 50s and 60s, and has cooked and discussed cooking in Georgia for almost 35 years. In the course of her lifetime, she has probably browned a small herd of cows. She knows no terminology for this process other than thawing and browning the meat. And if she doesn't know a term for it, I doubt that there is one.
But I think deaconB's mom's word "scrabble" ought to be accepted as perfectly reasonable, either as imitative of the movements and sounds involved, or as an extension of existing meanings of "scrabble," among whose definitions Webster's Unabridged lists:
1
: to gather or make hastily by clutching or scraping
<scrabbled up a supper out of leftovers> [My wife is familiar with this usage.]
2
: to make scratching movements on
<hens scrabbling the muddy cobbles — Dylan Thomas>
The associations with scraping and scratching make this usage seem quite sensible to me, even if your mom made it up. Of such resourcefulness is all languages' progress made! Without such innovators, we'd all still be speaking Proto-Indo-European. Mmm, PIE for dessert after hamburger gravy on toast.
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PS. It took me 20 minutes to scrabble up this post, because the software kept logging me out of the site. Anyone else experience this?
DavidR said
PS. It took me 20 minutes to scrabble up this post, because the software kept logging me out of the site. Anyone else experience this?
Forum software is a PITA. The software is constantly being upgrades to fight crackers, and often a software update simply means treasing the bugs you know how to cope with, for ones you don't know are there. Typically, foruns have a "skin" so it acts and appears the way the forum oener wants, and there is a lagf between the forum changing, and the skin changing to be fully compatible. Forum-masters try to tweak the software so resolve issues as wwll, making things very unstable. For the desktop, there is the MSIE browser, Chrome, Safari. Opera, two different Mozilla browsers, and there are just about as many browsers for tablets and phones, and each of these browsers has three or four versions that are common, - and that ignores the 10-20% "other" cases of strange browsers or old versions of the familiar ones. It's a wonder the forum looks and works right for anyone at any time.
And alkl this gets dumped in the lap of a sysop who is plagued by drive-by pposting of irrelevant matter, much of iy spam, but a large amount that is abusive or offensive (and remember, since we're discussing words, George Carlin's list can be used here, but discourteous posts using "FCC-safe" words are not.) The sysops here do a *great* job.
But to answer your question, yeah, *bleep* happens.
Thanks for finding those dictionary entries. I tend to use colorful expressions in my writing, but I hate to use expressions for which I can find *no* hint of legitimacy.
Martha Barnette
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