The NJ foods that don’t exist anywhere else — and what happens when you leave

Do you remember Templeton the Rat from Charlotte's Web?

Voiced brilliantly by Paul Lynde in the 1973 film and by Steve Buscemi in the 2006 version, Templeton is the rat who discovers the county fair and proceeds to eat absolutely everything in sight. Peanut butter sandwiches, popcorn, donuts, frozen custard, partially gnawed ice cream cones. He calls it a rat's paradise and he is not wrong. He waddles away bloated and boastful and completely without regret.

I hate to admit this, but Templeton may have been my spirit animal during my years on the Ocean City boardwalk and at the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Hammonton.

A typical Ocean City boardwalk day in my younger years started with a Taylor Pork Roll sandwich in the morning. Mack and Manco pizza for lunch. A Wawa turkey hoagie for dinner — perfectly reasonable, very healthy, good for you. And then back to the boardwalk for funnel cake, Kohr Brothers frozen custard, Steel's fudge and Johnson's Popcorn before the night was done. And those July nights at the Feast in Hammonton? Sausage sandwiches and funnel cake under the lights, rides that somehow never made you sick, and the beautiful metabolism of your twenties absorbing all of it without consequence.

Those days are behind me. Now instead of trying to get all of it in one night I pick one. Maybe two. Okay, three. But they are very intentional choices.

The point is this: these are not just foods. They are New Jersey. You cannot find them anywhere else, and the moment you move away or travel somewhere without them, you understand exactly what you had.

SEE ALSO: Is your NJ work lunch secretly costing you over $5,000 a year?

The foods that only exist here

Taylor Pork Roll — Call it pork roll or call it Taylor Ham depending on which side of the great divide you live on, but either way you cannot find the real thing outside of New Jersey. Breakfast sandwiches everywhere else are fine. They are not this.

Tomato pie — Not pizza. Not a variation of pizza. Tomato pie is its own thing, served at room temperature with the sauce on top of the cheese, and Trenton does it better than anywhere on earth. Out-of-staters do not understand it. That is their loss.

The boardwalk slice — Manco and Manco in Ocean City, Maruca's in Seaside, the boardwalk pizza of your youth cooked in a deck oven and eaten folded in half while walking. No plate. No fork. Perfect.

Kohr Brothers frozen custard — Softer, richer and more specific than soft serve. The orange and vanilla swirl on a sugar cone is a Shore summer in one bite. It exists elsewhere in name only.

Italian hot dog — A Newark original. Half a round of pizza bread stuffed with a hot dog, peppers, onions and potatoes. It sounds simple. It is extraordinary. Try explaining it to someone from Ohio.

Disco fries — French fries covered in brown gravy and melted mozzarella, available at any diner at 2 a.m. New Jersey invented the concept of making fries into a full emotional experience.

Sausage sandwiches at the Feast — Every Italian street festival in South Jersey runs on these. Peppers, onions, a good roll, grease that gets on your shirt no matter how careful you are. There is no substitute.

Funnel cake — Yes it exists elsewhere. No it does not taste the same. The boardwalk air is part of the recipe.

Steel's fudge and Johnson's Popcorn — Not foods so much as institutions. If you grew up going to Ocean City you know exactly what these smell like from half a block away.

The sub or the hoagie — Here is where New Jersey divides itself cleanly in two. North Jersey calls it a sub. South Jersey calls it a hoagie. (Actually not entirely true.  There are sections and stores in Atlantic and Cape May County who call it sub.)  Both are right, both are wrong, and the argument has been going on longer than most marriages. What everyone agrees on is that the best ones come from the mom and pop delis and sandwich shops that have been making them the same way for decades. Palumbo's, Primo's, your neighborhood deli whose name you have known since childhood. Built fresh, loaded properly, wrapped in white paper. The rest of the country has sandwiches. New Jersey has a religion.

What leaving teaches you

People who move away from New Jersey will tell you they miss the bagels, the pizza and the attitude. What they are really missing is all of this. The specific, unreplicable, completely New Jersey collection of foods that exist nowhere else with the same ingredients, the same context or the same memory attached to them.

Templeton was onto something. So were we.