Seen from New England, the fluffernutter is not a novelty version of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich but a regional institution that happens to look like one. In the rest of the country the marshmallow-creme build reads as a sweet variant; in its home corner it is the default, the lunchbox standard a generation grew up on, close enough to a state sandwich that there have been actual statehouse arguments about naming it one. That regional fact is the defining thing here. The same two ingredients, peanut butter on one slice of soft white bread and a thick layer of marshmallow creme on the other, pressed together, carry a different weight when they are the sandwich a place considers its own rather than a curiosity.
The craft is identical to the standard build but the regional reading sharpens what matters in it. The peanut butter is structural before it is flavor: spread to the bread, it waterproofs the crumb against the wet, sugary creme so the sandwich survives a morning in a bag instead of going to a sticky smear, which is the whole reason it worked as everyday New England school food in the first place. Marshmallow creme is looser and far sweeter than jelly, so the peanut butter has to go on heavier both to hold the structure and to keep the sweetness from being the only thing the mouth registers. The bread is deliberately soft, faintly sweet white sandwich bread, because a crust with real chew fights a filling that has no texture of its own. The two layers go on separate slices and meet at the end so neither soaks the bread before the sandwich is closed. The result is intentionally one-note in texture, soft against soft, and that plainness is exactly what made it a regional staple rather than a treat: cheap, fast, portable, and forgiving.
The fluffernutter sits in the American peanut butter and jelly family, the sweet-sandwich shelf whose founding rule is a soft carrier, a spreadable anchor, and a sweet center that has to stay put. Its relations keep that frame and change the sweet half or the assembly: the banana version that adds sliced fruit, the grilled fluffernutter turned molten in a buttered pan, the standard jelly PB&J it stands beside. Those deserve their own articles rather than being crowded in here.