This morning, I encountered a reference to McKee's Livermush, a popular local specialty in North Carolina. In searching for more information about Livermush, I encountered this website, which I found fascinating. Slugburger, anyone?

http://www.dixiedining.com/folklore.htm
Anyone have any history with this, or other unusual regional delicacies?

Someone explained the differnce between livermush and scrapple to me once, but I forget what that was . The two seem awfully similar to me, but I've only had scrapple (which I love) and not livermush.

I too love scrapple, and after moving to North Carolina was delighted to discover liver mush, which for all practical purposes is the same thing as you pointed out. I too have heard there is some "difference," but I doubt it's any greater than the differences among brands of either product.

FWIW, the "mush" part is because of the corn meal aspect of the dish. Out in the country "mush" is a boiled corn meal preparation, essentially the same as polenta (squid vs. calamari anyone), except that it's typically eaten while still hot and flowing like a hot cereal, not after it cools and can be cut into wedges as polenta often is. Liver mush, like scrapple, is made from the final bits of the pig which are cooked then mixed with corn meal, then chilled into loaf form. A finer breakfast meat could hardly be imagined. Another example of poor and frugal people (Amish in Pennsylvania, hill folk in NC) turning the cheap little bits into something sublime.

Maybe the companies that make it could charge more if they called it liver polenta--in fact, I'm sure that somewhere in some little corner of Italy they make exactly that and call it that.

I learned of liver mush when I was in exile in North Carolina. The one friend I made down there, a native of the Charlotte area, extolled its virtues. His description of liver mush and my description of scrapple (which, as I recall, he hadn't heard of any more than I'd heard of liver mush) led us both to conclude that they were the same thing. Since I think scrapple is kind of disgusting, I didn't try the liver mush to verify our conclusion.