But one that is both sweet and crunchy.
Traditionally, scroggin is a combination of dried fruit, grains, nuts, sometimes chocolate, and other random elements, informally developed as a snack food taken along on hikes by those who dare.
1. Gorp? Right. Gorp. Right?
You may know this stuff as "gorp", or you may know "gorp" only as a sound that your body makes when it is happy, sad, angry, a bit under the weather, or simply when it is operating normally (sad but true for some of us).
Yeah, well.
2. Scroggin is New-Zealand-Speak for chocolate, nuts and dried fruits mixed together and coated in sugar. Sugar.
Sugar. Coated in sugar.
The name (scroggin) may have come from the list of supposed ingredients:
- Sultanas (white grapes, presumably dried, i.e., raisins)
- Chocolate
- Raisins (again, but this time appearing as dark wrinkly things)
- candied Orange peels
- candied Ginger
- Glucose (sugar, more of it)
- Improvisation
- Nuts
And then again maybe not. Who can say?
Scroggin is in fact probably a "backronym", a word created to explain the term "scroggin" long after that same "scroggin" came into use (note that raisin-like things appear twice (veeery suspicious), and that even though the supposed etymology contains "improvisation", you can't eat improvisation, no matter how clever you are, because it is a technique, not an ingredient .
3. A scroggin could also be one of those little things that crawls around on your skin, under your clothes or in your hair, makes you itch, and is too small to find, but continues to drive you nuts. A cootie. Often imaginary. Works for me.
Fear of cooties stands in for fear of bears in those places where you know there are no bears, because what is life without fear?
4. Maybe a scroggin might be anybody who has cooties, or whom you wish would get them. Because that would work too.
So, how about a scroggin as a pariah, an outcast, crackpot, crank, exile, kook, oddball, solitudinarian, nut job, maybe even a former friend or loved one.
This latter attitude can develop among the best of friends who spend too much time together in a proximity that is simply too close, too tight, too airless. (Long distance backpacking trips are not recommended for honeymooners. By those who have found out the hard way.)
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Me? Still waiting to get unvaccinated, because contrary.