(Many of the fairs, festivals, and other wonderful food events that usually fill my calendar each spring have been postponed or cancelled. This post is based on a past year's festivals.)
To hold diced pork roll in place, what's better than maple icing?
Sometimes called Taylor ham after its most famous maker, in the city of its birth this skinless, mildly seasoned minced-meat sausage is better known as Trenton pork roll. Following an inaugural festival, in 2014, the organizers parted company, and in 2015 they held competing events on the same day.
With the exception of southern New Jersey's iconic pork roll, egg, and cheese sandwich and the burger below, many menu items at both festivals simply added or swapped in pork roll where it had seldom been added before. Greens, or fresh produce of any color, were harder to come by. Shown: a Trenton burger, four rounds of pork roll on a half-pound patty, with cheese, from the WTF Food Truk (sic); funnel cake, dressed with pork roll, from Killarney's Publick House; pork roll poutine from the Whole Foods Market of Princeton; pork roll tots from The Tot Cart; and a "Trenton Logger," a just-fried donut topped with maple icing and diced pork roll, from Uncle Dood's Donuts. Those last two items, at separate festivals, were the best bites of the afternoon — though the walk in between, a half-mile each way, scarcely burned off a tot's worth of calories.
Trenton Pork Roll Festival in Mill Hill Park
www.PorkRollFestival.com
Trenton Pork Roll Festival at Trenton Social
www.TrentonPorkRollFestival.com
(Both 2020 festivals, originally planned for May 23, have been rescheduled for later in the year — alas, on different days)
