Growing up in suburban New England, fluffernutters—two slices of white bread slathered with peanut-butter and marshmallow goop—were a lunchbox staple for many of my classmates. For the elementary school set, it’s a pretty optimal snack, one that fully dispenses with the vague pretense of fruit in a PB&J in favor of a maximum sugar rush. The combination has been a cult fixture in the northeast for more than a century. We know it’s not good per se, but it holds a place of perverse regional pride that only comes from nostalgia. In 2006, when Massachusetts Senator Jarret Barrios proposed legislation that would forbid schools from serving fluffernutters more than once a week, it caused such a public uproar that Democratic Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein declared, “I’m going to fight to the death for Fluff.”
Although Reinstein’s bill to make the fluffernutter the official state sandwich of Massachusetts remains in legal limbo, the word “fluffernutter” has since been added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. There’s also a Fluffernutter Day (on October 8th) as well as an annual What the Fluff? festival held in Somerville, Massachusetts, with events including “fluff jousting” and “fluff hairdo” (it’s exactly as messy as it sounds).
As a kid, I just assumed some other pre-teen had come up with the ingenious idea of smuggling dessert to school in sandwich form. But in reality, the fluffernutter began as a marketing ploy. Emma Curtis, who co-founded the Curtis Marshmallow Company with her brother, first created a recipe for “Liberty Sandwiches” made with peanut butter and their trademarked Snowflake Marshmallow Creme in 1918. The creme was essentially the same as marshmallows, but minus the gelatin needed for the amorphous mass of corn syrup and egg whites to hold a solid shape. Curtis may have come up with the sandwich, but credit for its key ingredient belongs elsewhere. Joseph Archibald Query, a Canadian living in Somerville, Massachusetts, invented Marshmallow Fluff the year prior, only to sell it in 1920 to the Durkee-Mower candy company when wartime sugar rationing made it too tough to make a profit.
Durkee-Mower tried all sorts of tactics to promote Marshmallow Fluff, including a 1930s radio show with dancing girls called the Flufferettes. Then when the 1960s rolled around, a branding agency helped them come up with the term “fluffernutter.” Thanks to a nationwide ad campaign, the name and the sandwich stuck.