Fluffernutter

In the cafeteria of an elementary school in Somerville, Massachusetts on a weekday in October, a peanut-butter-and-Marshmallow-Fluff sandwich sits on most of the lunch trays. It is the regional default rather than the regional novelty. Two slices of soft white bread, peanut butter on one face, a thick spoon of marshmallow creme on the other, pressed shut and cut on the diagonal, are the sandwich a Massachusetts mother packs in a paper bag at quarter to seven the same morning she did the morning before. The same two ingredients in the same proportions in the rest of the country read as a sweet variant of the peanut butter and jelly. Here in Middlesex County they read as the standard sandwich.

The regional reading rearranges the standing. Outside New England a school lunch defaults to peanut butter and jelly, and the marshmallow-creme version reads as a sweet variant a child gets occasionally. Inside Massachusetts and the rest of New England it splits, with marshmallow creme taking a real share of the lunchboxes a parent packs by reflex, alongside the jelly version rather than instead of it. The regional grip is documented in the legislative record: bills to name the sandwich the official Massachusetts state sandwich have been filed in the state House of Representatives in 2006, 2009, 2013, and again in 2017, never enacted. The regional weight is what makes that legislative argument possible at all.

The build is regional partly because the materials are regional. Marshmallow Fluff has been manufactured at Durkee-Mower's plant on Empire Street in Lynn, Massachusetts since 1920, and the company has stayed family-run on the same product line for over a century. The peanut butter is national-brand commercial creamy at the school-lunch grade, Skippy or Jif or the supermarket house label. The bread is the soft American sandwich loaf, Sunbeam or Wonder Bread or a regional New England brand like Country Kitchen. The peanut butter goes on heavier than for a jelly sandwich because the Fluff runs looser and far sweeter and a thin peanut layer leaves the lunchbox a sugar smear by morning recess. The marshmallow creme goes on the second slice rather than the first so the two layers do not mix on the knife. The closed sandwich is cut on the diagonal because the diagonal cut is the New England school-cafeteria convention.

Open the paper bag in the cafeteria at quarter past noon and the smell is faint and almost neutral, soft white bread with a low sweetness behind it. The crumb gives way against the teeth, the marshmallow creme arrives a beat after the peanut butter as a sugary slacken on the tongue rather than as a discrete sweetness, the peanut layer leaves a film along the upper palate and stays past the swallow. There is no crunch, no crust, no temperature change, no resistance anywhere. The carton of milk on the side is essential, not optional, because the marshmallow leaves the mouth claggy and the milk is the only thing in a school cafeteria that cuts it. A child eating one looks like a child eating one.

The Massachusetts legislative argument has its own narrative line and is the cultural anchor that distinguishes the regional reading. State Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein of Revere filed the first bill in 2006 to make the fluffernutter the official state sandwich; the same year, State Senator Jarrett Barrios filed competing legislation to ban sale of Marshmallow Fluff in school cafeterias on nutrition grounds, after his eight-year-old son ate it at lunch every day for a week. The two bills sat in the same statehouse on the same calendar and the press treated the contest as a local comedy. Both died in committee. Bills to name the sandwich the state sandwich have been refiled in subsequent sessions and have not been enacted. The Massachusetts public school system has continued to permit Marshmallow Fluff on school lunch trays in the years since.

The variations stay close to the New England base. The grilled version closes the sandwich in a buttered skillet, kept on the heat until the spreads turn molten and the marshmallow caramelizes against the bread, an after-school move rather than a cafeteria one. The banana fluffernutter slides ripe banana slices between the two spreads. A bacon-and-fluffernutter version exists in Boston bar menus and is sometimes named the Elvis-of-the-North. The closest sibling, on the regional shelf, is the standard peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich the rest of the country defaults to. The Fool's Gold Loaf, the peanut-butter-jelly-and-bacon loaf flown from Denver to Graceland for Elvis Presley in February 1976, is sometimes named in the same breath because it shares the peanut-butter base, but it is a different sandwich on a different bread.

Origin and history

The sandwich's regional grip runs through the manufacturing history of its sweet half. Marshmallow Fluff was developed by Archibald Query in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1917 and sold for production rights in 1920 to H. Allen Durkee and Fred Mower, two World War I veterans who had returned to Lynn, Massachusetts and were looking for a confection to manufacture. Durkee-Mower set up production at 130 Empire Street in Lynn and has operated continuously at that address for over a century, still family-run, still making the same product. The peanut-butter-and-Fluff sandwich appeared in print as a wartime recipe under the name Liberty Sandwich in a 1918 cookbook published by Emma E. Curtis through the Durkee-Mower precursor company.

The sandwich's settling into the New England school cafeteria tracks the post-war suburban expansion of Massachusetts and Connecticut and the rise of pre-packaged lunch in those decades. The name Fluffernutter was coined by a Boston advertising agency in 1960 for a Durkee-Mower radio jingle aimed at the elementary-school-aged audience the company had cultivated through the 1950s; the agency name has been variously cited and the contemporary trade press is the firmest source. The Whoopie Pie and the fluffernutter are the two confectionery foods most closely identified with twentieth-century Massachusetts regional cooking by state-historical surveys, and both originate within fifty miles of Boston.

Bills to name the fluffernutter the official Massachusetts state sandwich have been filed in the state House of Representatives in 2006, 2009, 2013, and 2017. Each has been referred to committee and not enacted, and the sandwich's official status remains the same as it was in 1960 when the Boston advertising agency printed the trademark: a regional confection without statutory recognition, eaten at the rate of millions of pounds of marshmallow creme a year. Marshmallow Fluff is still manufactured at 130 Empire Street in Lynn, Massachusetts by Durkee-Mower, still family-run, still on the same Empire Street block where the company opened in 1920.