Breakfast Sandwich – Pork Roll, Egg & Cheese

Pork roll is so Jersey Bruce Springsteen almost wrote a song about it.

Pork roll is so Jersey it has to shave twice a day.

Pork roll is so Jersey it’s rented the same house on LBI for the last decade.

Pork roll is so…Hey, whaddya you looking at?

Pork roll is so Jersey it’s a regular at every diner in the state.

Seriously, if you’re in New Jersey and stop to eat at a diner and don’t see pork roll on the menu, calmly put the laminated menu back in the holder, grab a few mints from the bingo ball roller on the host station, and get back in your car and drive to the next diner.

Some places refer to this as Taylor ham, but that’s putting lipstick on a pig, if you ask me. A sweet, delicious pig.

When I saw that the generic “breakfast sandwich” was one of the January sandwiches, I knew that I had to write up the quintessential Jersey diner breakfast–fried pork roll, scrambled egg, and cheese on a hard roll. I grew up in New Jersey, but have lived in Philly for the last 6 years. Fortuitously for this post, though, I just moved back to the dirty Jerz for a new job. Even more fortuitously there’s a little diner around the corner of my place of employment, Annabella’s Kitchen.

The place is pretty damn near perfect. Our coffee came in shatterproof thick white porcelain mugs. Even though the waitress looked to be about 20, she called me “hon” and said “cawfee” with an accent that reminded me of my New Yorker mother. She also rightly gave me a little side eye when I asked for cheddar rather than American cheese on my sandwich. “If we don’t have cheddar, than you want American, right?” she asked, clearly trying to steer me back to the path of the righteous. “Absolutely.”

 The sandwich was perfect. Just look at those eggs! These were not the overcooked disks that most diners churn out. No, these scrambled eggs were fluffy and moist, glued appropriately to the roll with cheese. But the real star was the slices of fried pork roll. Pork roll, invented in the Trenton-area and still manufactured there by just a couple factories, is a mixture of finely ground pork products that are very gently spiced and encased. It’s not dissimilar from bologna or even scrapple, though unlike the latter, it’s actually edible. You can buy it pretty much in any supermarket in northern or central Jersey and can even have it shipped to you if you’re experiencing withdrawal and live in far-off lands. Cooks score the edges so it fries without curling. A good sear and it’s crispy, greasy, and comforting all at once. A little hot sauce never hurt either.

It’s even inspired poetry:

But we must further ourselves on.
So dynamic is life, staring into the sights
Not right, but wrong in a good way.

So mom, if you please, pass me the pork roll egg and cheese, if you please,
On a kaiser bun.

I know it sounds like Keats wrote that, but it’s actually by Ween, the weirdo rockers out of New Hope, PA, close enough to Jersey that they understand the true brilliance of simplicity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQdmKVkWbGU

juliachildish

No denying it, I like the sensual things of the world, especially good food and drink, though I’m no snob when it comes to either. A background in American cultural history and food studies makes me approach the world with a desire for contextualization and connection on the way to synthesis.