If you were raised in northern New England, or spent any appreciable amount of time there, you already know what I am about to tell you: Beach pizza is a thing of local lore. There is some debate among people in my hometown — Newburyport, Massachusetts, a coastal city tucked between Boston and the New Hampshire border — about whether or not I, a person born in New York and raised in New England, should be allowed to identify as a Bay Stater. But when the conversation turns to pizza, my provenance becomes clear. I’m from New England. If I were not, I would not have a horse in this pizza race.

In the lengthy annals of pizzadom, New England beach pizza is little more than a blip on the carbohydrate radar; a connoisseur might deem beach pizza objectively bad. Cooked in sheet trays, it has a barely perceptible crust, an even less prominent dusting of cheese, and an overly sweet sauce that owes its flavor profile to Prego. Hold a square in your hand and you’ll be reminded, somewhat nostalgically, of an Ellio’s slice. There is wafer-thin crust and crunch, and your inevitable impatience to take a chomp out of it will be repaid with a burnt roof of the mouth, because waiting for perfectly imperfect things is difficult. For an extra 50 cents, the pizzaiolos at Cristy’s and Tripoli Pizza Bakery, the two rival vendors who produce this species of pizza, will melt an extra disk of provolone onto your slice. This is not great pizza. And yet, somehow, it is.

It’s more than nostalgia that moves us. Scarcity can make a food feel sacred, as if it exists only in its native home and our memories. That’s the case with beach pizza. Anywhere else, it would be mediocre; here, on the slip of Atlantic where Massachusetts and New Hampshire share a border, this pizza inspires devotion, maybe even love. Nearly everyone from my hometown has a favorite, whether it’s Cristy’s or Tripoli, and switching pizza loyalties is tantamount to rooting for the Yankees, or to enunciating your consonants.

The thing about foods that are only available in one area — in this case, northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire — is that they become part of the scenery. Food burrows into our lives, inserts itself into our fondest memories. It connects us to the people we’ve lost and to the sweet, salty, and sour pieces of our personal history. Does food need to be epic to ground us in a particular moment in time? It does not. That’s why, when I think of home and its culinary riches, I bypass New England staples like steamed lobster served with drawn butter, fried whole-belly clams, and, of course, chowder. The taste I pine for most is beach pizza.

Beach pizza originated nowhere near the beach. Its roots are 20 miles inland, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an old mill city bisected by the Merrimack River, where the Sicilian bakery Tripoli began baking cannoli and other pastries in the early 1920s. Lawrence had just emerged, damaged, from the Bread and Roses strike of 1912, a response to unsafe working conditions at the textile mills, and locals no doubt needed something happier to think about. Following this notorious labor strike, Tripoli and its cannoli provided much-needed comfort to a depleted city. In 1944, Tripoli expanded their repertoire, adding sheet-tray pizza to the menu. The business grew from there, spreading to neighboring North Andover and Methuen before eventually migrating north to the beach towns: Salisbury, Massachusetts, and Seabrook, New Hampshire.

As a trend and New England right of passage, beach pizza was the result of circumstance and geography. Salisbury Beach was once the playground of the non-coastal New Englander, with summertime crowds flocking to its boardwalk the way New Yorkers flooded Coney Island. It was home to the country’s first modern roller coaster, the Sky Rocket, which closed in the mid-1950s. There were top-billing performers and tangential amusement parks, luxury homes built right on the sand, and a crowd that came to spend their hard-earned money at the arcades. And then the economic downturn of the early 1970s wrecked Salisbury. The remaining roller coasters closed, and tanking property prices turned Salisbury into a down-on-its-luck has-been.

But during the fatter years, Tripoli, and, later, Cristy’s, moved in, establishing a coveted, regional food that would become associated with this particular beach. Even as Salisbury crumbled, the pizza remained, and those rectangular pies are now the heritage of every northern New England kid unleashed into the world on a Saturday night with nothing better to do than eat a slice in the sea-brisk air. This is not a summer-only rarity, and that’s important in a region with interminable winters. Although Salisbury may feel abandoned in January, you can still get a slice well into the night. You can eat a whole pie in your car. Many before you have done the same. Many after you will. There is no shame in the sublime.

A word about that Tripoli-Cristy’s rivalry: A New Englander’s pizza allegiance runs true to her blood, inherited from birth. For me, it’s Cristy’s, the slice that my Massachusetts-born mother has always eaten. To tell the truth, though, besides the sauce, the pizza is largely the same. The brittle crust and the spare shake of cheese, these are equal parts Tripoli and Cristy’s. And so, in this case, it is the sauce that cements a lifetime of commitment. Cristy’s, which sells only pizza, produces a less sweet pizza that’s equally crispy (and still plenty sugary). With beach pizza, sweet is not pejorative; it’s foundational. Beach pizza’s sauce cannot be anything but sweet. The right amount of sweetness depends on your palate, and, if you’re a newcomer whose loyalty is not bound by lineage, that sweetness will likely determine if you join Camp Tripoli or Camp Cristy’s.

No pizza, no matter how inspired, is the cardinal attraction of northern Massachusetts, and it probably never will be. You come to New England for the beach, for the yellow-duned, sea grass-tufted, green- and black-watered beach — and not for the paper-plated slices on the Salisbury strip. But I implore you: Try the pizza. Drive north up Route 1 through Salisbury and you’ll arrive at the parcel of land abutted by the Atlantic, where Massachusetts dead ends into New Hampshire. Salisbury Beach is an exercise in camp. Choose between Skee-Ball at Joe’s Playland and coming-of-age lap dances at Ten’s, the strip club across the street. At dusk, the neon lights of Tripoli and Cristy’s shine bright, recalling an earlier era, and then the lines begin to form. These pizza restaurants are two storefronts apart, but the space between them is impossibly wide.

There’s a case to be made for local foods that are not “good” by most standards, transportive foods that end up more than the sum of their ingredients. A slice from Tripoli or Cristy’s doesn’t move the needle in pizza debates that ponder the merits of 00 flour and wood versus coal and buffalo mozzarella and San Marzano tomatoes. But along this tiny, forgotten-to-the-rest stretch of the Atlantic, Tripoli and Cristy’s recipe for mediocrity — a flick of wan cheese, a smear of saccharine sauce, a puck of dough two card decks wide — is magic.

So go ahead. Eat the bad pizza. The kind, uniformed souls who man the windows will ask if you want a corner slice or an interior slice (you want one of each), if you want toppings (you do not), and whether or not you desire extra cheese (you definitely do). When your two slices appear, appallingly hot, provolone circle dripping, they’re scuttled onto overlapping paper plates.

You will burn your mouth. If you do not burn your mouth, you are doing this whole thing wrong. Bad pizza requires sacrifice, and your thin-skinned upper palate is the willing supplicant. Lean back on an unclean bench, overlooking not the ocean, but the median, where there are cigarette butts and assorted ephemera — summer garbage. It will not feel beautiful, necessarily, but somehow, molten pizza in hand, it will feel sacred.

Hannah Selinger is a food, travel, and culture writer based in East Hampton, NY.

Carolyn Figel is a freelance artist living in Brooklyn.

Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter