Notable Sandwiches #66: Fluffernutter

An ode to joy

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the bizarre document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a guest column from my father, James Lavin, on a beloved treat: the fluffernutter.

My father grew up in the 1960s, chemist dad, homemaker mom, in the suburban idyll of Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Confronted with the Fluffernutter, I knew I had to hand over the reins to that beloved patriarch: even now, in a pantry full of açai berries, chia seeds and grains so whole they’re practically sprouting, there is always an incongruous white jar of marshmallow fluff. For my dad, it’s a sticky key to his childhood, an instantaneous portal to a most distant memory. So I asked him to write a few of those memories down.

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From James Lavin, entrepreneur, granddad, triathlete, Fluff enthusiast:

Thoughts on a white bread sandwich. Wonder Bread, peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff — the perfect combination of tastes and an ode to joy —the Fluffernutter sandwich.  Joy, Joy, Joy. The last one I had — unless my oxygen-starved brain was off — was at an aid station in March 2023 at the Run the Rocks three-day trail race in Moab. Probably with whole wheat bread, but after two hours who cares? The first ones are sweet memories from the haze of a time long ago — a time when car seats weren’t needed and bench seats front and back were the standard. And drive-ins had many uses. But that was when I was a bit older.

Where I grew up in Massachusetts in the early ‘60s (the birthplace of Fluff, in 1918) the norm was for elementary school kids to ride their bikes home for lunch. They still make Fluff in Massachusetts, in Lynn, about a hundred miles from where I grew up, a skinny kid on the back of a bike, and always hungry in only the way a boy who knows there’s food at home can be. Yes, from kindergarten on I struggled up the hill on my street, pushed my bike up the really steep sidewalk, and off to school — sidewalks were for biking. No adults walked, they drove, in big finned cars if they could afford them. Yes, actual unsupervised full mobility with no cell phones existing in the universe. We also had an air rifle team and 4^th-6^th graders on the team rode to school with their rifles strapped to their backs to practice in the range under the school gym area without any incidents. Slug rifles, but they could take eyes and a lot more out, including squirrels, although that took a few shots. But back to eating …

In retrospect there had to be somewhere for kids who brought lunch, but mostly if someone didn’t have a mom at home — it was all moms back then, though they weren’t always as welcoming as mine —they came to my house — mostly because they all loved my mother and secondly because there was always lots of milk, in glass gallons, and plenty of peanut butter sandwiches. My mother Norma listened to them and gave them sharp advice; she never minced words. She was brilliant — the daughter of two Jewish immigrants from Minsk who’d been sent to America to avoid being drafted into the tsar’s army. They’d been wealthy in the Old Country. Then they weren’t. Her father became a law court translator because he knew seven languages; he could add columns of numbers in his head, skim the Talmud like a novel. Even if it was only peas, they always shared with any guest to their house in New Haven. For my mother religion meant poverty. She became a dental hygienist, then a housewife, her domain a one-story ranch house with a backyard that ended in a precipitous wooded gully with a stream at the bottom. My two brothers and I, along with a motley crew of Longmeadow students, built dams of increasing sophistication over the stream, used the gully to test propane cannons. We learned about water power and singed eyebrows. This kingdom was too small for her. But she managed the titanic task of keeping a whole neighborhood of boys fed.

She was the kind of lady that met a girl I dated in business school and didn’t bother with the sotto vocce when she told me — dump her, she’s dumb as a brick. She was just as direct when I was seven. Everyone of all ages came to her for advice, and even in the single digits, my friends knew it. She was five foot four of pure nervy intelligence. She also had the Fluff jar.

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Fluff, that magical white substance, with way too light and floaty a name for a taste and texture that outstrips the white truffle, gourmands be damned. Corn syrup and egg white and sugar and artificial flavor. and A mere 40 calories for two tablespoons — but two tablespoons is not enough for a thick fluffernutter. Fluff is a safety food that promotes physical and mental health. Safety because a too thick peanut butter sandwich on white bread can get stuck in your mouth and choke you (trust me, or my 9-year-old’s memory), the only salvation a massive dose of milk. Whole milk ,by the way, not the watery somewhat bluish skim milk that you saw in the supermarket. No 1%, 2%, and CERTAINLY no oat, smoat, groat, blech milk.

Mental health. Seriously, the taste, the sweetness and light, combined with Skippy peanut butter (crunchy) for the oil and substance. Sorry, had to pause my writing for a moment of blissful recollection of being around a round table in our kitchen with my friend Jeff — who always came over since his house was a lot further from the school, and my smiling mother with her bright-red lipstick. Nowadays, the Wonder Bread is gone — replaced by sourdough breads and sprouted wheat breads which DO NOT MAKE FOR A FLUFFERNUTTER — but I still sneak in Marshmallow Fluff. Then I take two spoons — one for the fluff and one for the peanut butter — and mush them together into one really high piled spoon of mental satisfaction far exceeding the joys of good scotch … and another one, and another one … And I think of the woman who used to dispense them, and days that are long gone.