On a mid-December day almost sixteen years ago, I made a trip to visit my college boyfriend’s hometown in West Virginia. He and I are both from cities known affectionately as “Motown”, but the differences between the two are stark. That afternoon I boarded a plane in Detroit, a place that was unremittingly flat, gray-skied, and half-buried under piles of dirty snow. When I landed in Pittsburgh, I was surprised that a flight of a little less than an hour could have transported me to such wildly different landscape. As my boyfriend and I drove south, I reveled in the feeling of being tucked in between the hills.
Everything I saw had a slightly different flavor than what I was used to. And when we arrived in Morgantown it was early evening, and large, feathery snowflakes were beginning to fall. WVU’s Woodburn Hall was outlined with softly glowing Christmas lights, and the snow dusted its unique roofline. I knew then that West Virginia and I would be seeing a lot of each other. (In hindsight I can recognize that, had this first visit occurred on a humid September day riddled with student traffic, I might not have fallen so hard. But fall, I did.)
On one of those early visits, my boyfriend and I went out to dinner, and the Greek salad I ordered was all wrong. When it arrived, I looked down at my plate and said in bewilderment, “Where are the beets?” My boyfriend and the waiter seemed very confused by my confusion. “Beets?” The waiter asked. “In a Greek Salad?”
The West Virginia Way
It turns out that the salads I had been eating my whole life are actually known as “Detroit-style” Greek Salads. Adding sliced beets on top of the lettuce, feta cheese, and olives is a culinary quirk that developed in the Detroit area (ostensibly because one restaurateur had an oversupply of beets), and went no further.
For good reason, my boyfriend teased. It was slightly later when he revealed the existence of West Virginia’s own culinary quirk, one somewhat less colorful and fibrous than a Greek salad with beets. He explained that Italian immigrants had settled in the area to work in the local coal mines in the early 20th century. When confronted with a need for a filling, nonperishable food to bring down with them into the mines, they developed something called a “pepperoni roll”. I can vividly recall the blissful expression on his face when he described what sounded an awful lot like a pizza pocket.
I found the origin story quite interesting, but as I’ve never liked pizza or any of its variations (it’s the tomato sauce that is the real source of my distaste), I didn’t bother to try one for a very long time, even when I ended up married to my West Virginia boyfriend. We moved to Pittsburgh, then to Wheeling, then had a bunch of kids. During that time, the pepperoni roll beat out dozens of regional dishes to win the CG Roll Call Taste of America Challenge, thanks to social media support from the pepperoni roll’s many passionate fans.
In the same year, House Concurrent Resolution No. 84 was passed, declaring the pepperoni roll to be the official state food of West Virginia. At the end of the bill, it says, “Further resolved, that all citizens of West Virginia to join in recognizing the value and importance of pepperoni rolls in West Virginia”. Still, I resisted. We moved to the Midwest for some years, where we took part in another regional culinary quirk: deep-fried cheese curds.
Heaven on Earth
Then we moved back to West Virginia. One day I came across a local organization that was fundraising by selling pepperoni rolls made at Chico Bakery in Morgantown. I bought some for my family to eat, and one of my kids left the tail-end of one on their plate after lunch. Being especially hungry, and yet not inclined to actually make something for myself, I broke down and ate the leftovers. That was the moment when I belatedly discovered that pepperoni rolls are in no way like pizza pockets, do not contain tomato sauce, and are, in fact, a bit of heaven on earth.
Though many bakeries throughout north-central West Virginia that claim to be the progenitor of the pepperoni roll, Candace Nelson states in her book The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll, that, “It is likely that the first creators of the pepperoni roll were home cooks—wives in particular”. Sometime around the 1930s, bakeries such as in Country Club Bakery (originally People’s Bakery) in Fairmont, and Tomaro’s Bakery in Clarksburg began to commercialize their own versions of the pepperoni roll. Though the basics are the same (a pepperoni product encased in bread dough and baked), there is a wide variation in styles: soft bread or crusty, pepperoni sticks or slices, with cheese or peppers or both.
The qualities that comprise “the best” pepperoni roll are contested sometimes hotly. However, I think April Kaull, quoted in The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll, put it best when she said, “the best pepperoni roll is the one you grew up with–the one you’ll keep coming home for.” I didn’t grow up with them, but they are starting to taste like home to me.
Prepared or Homemade
I still like my Detroit-style Greek salads, but my family and I eat pepperoni rolls quite often now. During the age of COVID-19, when I never seem to have enough time or energy, I turn to this regional food for reasons similar to those of the people who first conceived of them. Pepperoni rolls are cost-effective, filling, can be eaten with one hand as we all work and attend school while at home, and won’t spoil if they get left out on the counter overnight.
And they are so tasty, even the pickiest of my kids doesn’t complain when I serve them for the second time in a week. We usually purchase them ready-made, but on special occasions, my husband will bake them from scratch. When he does, he tries to recreate the rolls that were served in his school cafeteria—soft, fluffy bread surrounding a healthy portion of sliced pepperoni. I am content to sit at the counter while he does the baking, and then help myself to the results.
