New England made a permanent impression on me, as evidenced by my linguistic and culinary relationship with scallops. Before moving to Boston, I had never eaten a scallop. I had no interest in scallops. As you can probably tell by the near complete lack of seafood recipes on this site, I’m not much of a fish eater, though I do continually vow to introduce it into my diet more often. And I thought scallops were some of the grossest of the gross in the aquatic world. They just looked like slimy blobs, and who wants to eat slimy blobs? Well, thanks to Boston’s seafood-heavy culture, and to Mr. X, I now want to eat slimy blobs, as long as those slimy blobs are scallops.
And yes, I cannot help myself from pronouncing this word as “scaw-lops,” in true New England fashion. And for this I blame one of my favorite library school professors, who had an old school Cantabrigian (as in, Massachusetts) accent, and liked to use scallops as an example in data modeling lessons, for reasons I will never really know.
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