Salt Water Taffy Named NJ's Official Dessert

Without a doubt, a variety of delicious desserts in something that isn't lacking in NJ. That's why Slate.com's official dessert choice for the Garden State is questionable.

Bob Snow, flickr

Salt water taffy. Not acceptable. An official NJ candy, sure! I'm by no means hating on salt water taffy, but it's not a dessert. It's more a snack, at least for me.

The article said:

Atlantic City, New Jersey, has made a number of lasting contributions to Americana: Monopoly, the Miss America pageant, that Bruce Springsteen song, and, most importantly, those color-coded candy cylinders that, despite their name, contain no salt water.

TELL US! What dessert would you nominate to represent the state? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below!

Author L.V. Anderson said of assigning an official dessert to all 50 states:

Such a formidable task requires some ground rules:

1. No two states can have the same dessert. Once a dessert is assigned to one state, no other state can lay claim to it. This rule will no doubt chagrin many readers who believe their state deserves banana pudding, but, as we all learned in childhood, we can’t always have banana pudding when we want it.

2. Brands are not desserts. For the purposes of this map, a dessert is a treat that can be made in your kitchen, not a trademarked secret recipe. There are lots of dessert brands closely associated with states—Ben and Jerry’s in Vermont, MoonPie in Tennessee, Pepperidge Farm in Connecticut, and Hershey’s in Pennsylvania, for instance—but you won’t find any of them on this map. (I did make a single exception for a certain brand name that has become synonymous with gelatin desserts of all stripes.)

3. No state gets apple pie—or chocolate chip cookies. Assigning apple pie to a single state would be tantamount to declaring that state more American than the others. We wouldn’t want to be responsible for sparking a second civil war, and so we’ve decided to take apple pie off the table, so to speak.