Plethora of Pork Roll: Reporter Jenna Pizzi has co-authored ‘The Pork Roll Cookbook,’ just in time for the May 23 festival organized by T.C. Nelson and another on the same date being planned by Scott Miller.
By Ron Shapella
Pork roll. If there were ever two words that packed their own Pavlovian response, pork roll might be the ones, conjuring smoky memories from the Jersey shore or the kitchen where your mother, or maybe your grandmother, fried it up for breakfast or lunch. Pork roll is potent enough to bring back the concession stand at a county fair, or a cookout in a local park.
Pork roll is also about Trenton, New Jersey’s high history-content state capital, where in the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs John Taylor and, a few years later, George Washington Case, created and sold the salty and spicy minced pork product that would become as much a part of the city’s culinary identity as tomato pies and pencil points.
Now, inevitably, there is “The Pork Roll Cookbook,” (Cider Mill Press) by Jenna Pizzi, a reporter for the Times of Trenton, with recipes by Susan Sprague Yeske, longtime food writer for the Times of Trenton and other publications. The new cookbook contains all the history you might ever need to know about pork roll. For example, the Taylors arrived in colonial New Jersey 100 years before Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, and three other New Jersey patriots signed the Declaration of Independence. George Washington Case was a farmer in Belle Mead, just north of the Mercer County line, in southern Somerset County, and in the 1850s both began producing competing versions of pork roll.
For those who ever wondered what more could be done with pork roll other than frying it, this is the cookbook you’ve been waiting for. It is a slender volume, 143 pages, but brightly designed and inviting. There is practically a different recipe on every page, all taking advantage of pork roll’s ability to play smokiness and tanginess off blander ingredients. For example: eggs in the classic pork roll breakfast sandwich, or pasta, or in combination with sweeter ingredients in salads, with pineapple as a pizza topping (Pizzi says that is her favorite recipe in the book) or with apple slices on top of flatbread. There are 50 recipes in the book all described with precise measurements.
The two pork roll brands are similar in flavor — not to mention both being very fatty and very salty — which suggests that some snitching of recipe intelligence must have taken place at some point over the many decades. It is common whenever there is such close competition, and the Gimbels versus Macy’s dynamic has always been a lively one in the food and beverage industry.
More than 150 years later with the two main pork roll producers still thriving in Trenton, it was only a matter of time until pork roll would be enshrined publicly with a festival featuring the customary trimmings of craft beer, rock music, and professional chefs striving to exalt a workaday food into more interesting forms, which they always manage to do.
And so, the inaugural Trenton Pork Roll Festival took place last year. By all accounts it was a big success, with thousands of attendees. Maybe it was too big a success. Speaking of history, the part where the goose lays the golden egg only to meet an untimely demise could be repeating itself as the two main organizers of the 2014 event, Scott Miller and T.C. Nelson have been unable to work toward a unified festival for 2015.
Nelson, 44, has deep roots in Trenton. He is a Trenton native who once ran Trenton Bagel on South Broad Street with his siblings. He now runs Trenton Social, the location of last year’s festival and where one of the festivals will take place on Saturday, May 23.
Miller, 47, is the owner of Exit 7A Creative Services and Studios in Trenton. A Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, native, he lives in Trenton in the building on Front Street that is his residence and the headquarters for his Exit 7A enterprise, which does media production work for small businesses. His passion for downtown Trenton goes back to when the former CoreStates Bank (now Wells Fargo) sponsored a bicycle race and when there was Heritage Days and Trenton Jazz Festival, events that have gone dormant in recent years.
Nelson and Miller share a high level of enthusiasm for supporting Trenton’s cultural life. You would have to look hard to find more avid cheerleaders for projects that promote downtown Trenton. Nelson’s mind always seems to be coming up with the next event that will highlight the history of Trenton and its neighborhoods.
Miller has similar ideas. “When people come to an event in Trenton they should learn about our history and about Patriots Week and how to invest in real estate and to open a business with the hope that they will revisit and learn something,” he says. “Patriots Week should be huge; it should be on the History Channel. People should know all about it.”
Miller is also a fan of events like Art All Night, which takes place in one of the old Roebling Steel buildings, and the Punk Rock Flea Market, which once called the Trenton Social parking lot its home.
“My idea was hey, we have these events, why shouldn’t they benefit the city,” Miller says. “All these events should be cross-promoting. So when you come to my festival you’re going to see something from the Punk Rock Flea Market and from the orchestra.”
Nelson holds First Fridays events and open mic nights, and he promotes art sales that benefit local nonprofits. Trenton Social has sponsored bicycle scavenger hunts and local soccer teams. Nelson has installed humidor-type lockers where customers can rent space to store favorite bottles of liquor. He is also expanding next door, where he wants to create a cigar lounge.
Between Miller and Nelson, there is no shortage of ideas, but there are conflicting visions of what the Trenton Pork Roll Festival should be and where it should take place, along with some leftover misunderstanding about whose idea the whole thing was originally and who might have been responsible for paying all the bills that remained last year after everyone went home and the rain stopped.
Miller says he would like to see proceeds from the festival go to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and to refurbishing the Battle Monument, which has been closed to the public for the last several years where it sits at the top of Five Points in Trenton, the intersection of Warren and North Broad streets, and Brunswick, Pennington and Princeton avenues. It is the spot where Continental soldiers aimed their cannon at Hessian troops, a tactic that helped turn the tide during the Battle of Trenton on Christmas Day, 1776 — the key event commemorated by Patriots Week.
The bottom line is that Trenton has two competing pork roll brands and, on Saturday, May 23, it will have two competing Pork Roll Festivals, one where it was last year, at Trenton Social on South Broad Street, and the other in Mill Hill Park.
There will be no shortage of pork roll-related attractions, including bands, beer and vendors slinging dishes made with pork roll. Admission to each is $5. Both festivals will be within walking distance of the other, albeit requiring a lengthy stroll on South Broad Street. The forecast is for ample parking in the city that day, which coincides with Memorial Day weekend. Sun National Bank Center, across from Trenton Social, has no events scheduled that day.
Nelson says the festival at Trenton Social will have a “Project Pork Roll” event, with clothing designed to incorporate the logos printed on the cotton bags in which pork roll is sold. “It’s like a Lady Gaga meat dress,” he says, “but not really.
Nelson also plans to feature Chef Chris Livolsi, who formerly toiled at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and who now teaches a culinary class at the Mercer ARC. Livolsi says he has created a pork roll-wrapped smoked jalapeno for the festival and hoped to find a batch of jalapenos that could be rendered mild enough for munching once the seeds and pith removed.
That is a recipe that did not make it into the Pork Roll Cookbook, which will be available on festival day. The cookbook came about, author Pizzi says, when the publisher, located in Kennebunkport, Maine, heard about the 2014 festival and decided “to do something that appealed to the people in the mid-Atlantic.”
Pizzi lives in Philadelphia, which, her book points out, might be the westernmost extent of pork roll’s culinary influence. She grew up in South Jersey, in Moorestown, where pork roll was never a popular dinner table item. In fact, she says, pork roll is so regional that she needed relatives in Bucks County to introduce her to it.
If the above doesn’t fill one up, a much more sedate event will also take place on May 23 in a once-neglected corner of the city, at 223 East Hanover Street not much farther than a stone’s throw from City Hall. In a vacant lot that once attracted drug addicts and gang members, an oasis of green has appeared in recent months. There Graham Apgar is working to create a small park, Gandhi Park, so named for the mural of the mahatma’s likeness, painted by Will Kasso, also of Trenton, on one of the walls near the Gandhi quote, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Apgar, 28, is a guitarist, artist, and dreamer. He says he has been living in a number of art studio spaces. On Saturdays he tends the Gandhi Garden — a project of the SAGE Coalition (Styles Advancing Graffiti’s Evolution) and developed with the Trenton Downtown Association.
“It’s just a vacant lot that we converted to a community garden,” he says. “We’re doing some beautification over on East Hanover Street. It’s a community park or garden that grows a little bit of food. It’s just a space for everything.”
So on that pork rolling day and a safe distance from the wrestling match over who is the King of the Trenton Pork Roll Festival, Apgar will be at Gandhi Park to tend his plants. He is inviting anyone who is interested to meet him there at 8 a.m. to help him garden.
“Every Saturday morning we go out there and work on it,” he says. “I’ll be out there during the two pork roll festivals and I just thought I’d stay out there and maybe grill some eggplant.”
He hopes it will turn into a potluck vegan food festival, though vegan pork roll may not be on the menu.
“We don’t know if there is a way to make vegan pork roll,” he says. “I have some ideas, but nothing that I think is actually going to work.”
He chuckles slightly over the disputes between the Pork Roll Festival organizers.
“They’re both friends of mine,” he says. “There’s no real competition, just a way to bring some light to the situation.”
He’ll have his guitar with him, he says, and said he will play requests, if he knows them. Add to that it’s potluck, and there’s no admission charge.
“It might just be a jam session,” he says. “It’s gonna be really informal. It’s a chance to have a nice little event and promote the garden.”
Pork or no pork, something’s on a roll in Trenton.
Saturday, May 23:
Pork roll and vegan fests
Pork Roll Festival: Trenton Social Restaurant, 449 South Broad Street, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., $5 admission, $25 for VIP (includes exclusive pork roll dishes made by Trenton Social, Pork Roll Bloody Mary with commemorative glass, and access to private hospitality area). For more information, go to trentonporkrollfestival.com.
Pork Roll Festival: Mill Hill Park, 100 South Broad Street, Trenton, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., $5.00 suggested donation. For more info, visit porkrollfestival.com or facebook.com/porkrollfestival.
Vegetarian Pork Roll Festival: Gandhi Garden, 223 East Hanover, Trenton, noon to 5 p.m., free, donation, participatory, facebook.com/events/340968819440705/.
Case Pork Roll Company, 644 Washington Street, Trenton, (609) 396-8171, caseporkrollstore.com.
Taylor Provisions Co. Inc., 63 Perrine Avenue, Trenton, (609) 392-1113, facebook.com/pages/Taylor-Provisions/110811132316036.
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