[Nfbwv-talk] WV in NY Times

Thu Oct 1 20:02:35 UTC 2009

I thought some of you might like to have this article to keep.  I know I do.

Karen

United Tastes - Pepperoni Rolls, a Piece of West Virginia Culinary History - 
Series - NY...

September 30, 2009 UNITED TASTES

Fast Food Even Before Fast Food

By JOHN T. EDGE

Shinnston, W.Va.

AFTER dropping a load of siding scrap at the dump here, Jeff Willis, a 
contractor in this onetime coal mining center, returned to the Go Mart for 
his second pepperoni roll of the morning.

>From a shelf by the door, above a cooler stocked with cellophane-wrapped 
sausage biscuits, he grabbed a paper bag of the rolls, baked that morning at 
D'Annunzio's in nearby Clarksburg, W.Va., and delivered before the sun rose.

"My mother packed these for my father," Mr. Willis said, as he bit into a 
yeast-risen stub of white bread, seams bursting with coins of Hormel 
pepperoni, bottom tinged russet by the meat's aromatic grease. "He worked a 
coal mine. This was his lunch. I eat the same thing. Breakfast and lunch 
both, it's what I want."

In the northern reaches of West Virginia, along a corridor of Appalachia 
stretching from Buckhannon, through Clarksburg, up to Morgantown, an 
appetite for pepperoni rolls cuts across class strata.

At BFS convenience stores, where they're sold alongside Hot Pockets and 
other nationally distributed graband-go foods, shift workers warm pepperoni 
rolls in microwave ovens and dip them in packets of marinara sauce. At the 
Ritzy Lunch, a venerable diner in Clarksburg, grill cooks dress split rolls 
with chili and cheese. Country club barkeepers sell pepperoni rolls as 
ballast to beer-drinking golfers. They're a breakfast food for glass-plant 
laborers, peddled at doughnut shops.

"You didn't have to speak English to dig coal," John Brunett said one recent 
afternoon, summarizing the cultural forces that gave birth to the pepperoni 
roll, the signature product of his family's bakery.

Along with his mother, Janice Brunett, and his sister, Marisa Brunett, he 
owns Tomaro's, a humble bunker of a business, with ovens in back and counter 
service up front. Founded by his great-grandfather, Anthony Tomaro, in 1914, 
the bakery is a community hub in the Italian-dominated Glen Elk neighborhood 
of Clarksburg.

West Virginians recognize the pepperoni rolls as a vestige of the state's 
bituminous coal mining industry, which, in the early years of the 20th 
century, before mechanization reduced the need for manual labor, recruited 
Italian immigrants to do extraction work with dynamite and pickax.

In 1900, West Virginia was home to more native-born citizens than any other 
state. But, as the coal industry

boomed and labor needs surged, that changed. Coal companies sought, as one 
historian put it, "a more docile, controllable work force than their 
American-born counterparts."

They did not get what they bargained for. Italian immigrants were just as 
inclined, if not more so, toward union affiliation and action.

By 1915, there were more Italian laborers than any of the other 20-plus 
nationalities working the coal fields.

Out of that cauldron of labor strife and self-definition came a hybridized 
food that owed as much to West Virginia as it did to Calabria, the region 
from which so many of the Italian immigrants came.

Asked to talk of pepperoni roll origins, Mr. Brunett spoke of his family 
history in the mines. (His greatgrandfather swung a pickax.)

But he didn't stake a claim to pepperoni roll primacy.

"I'm not sure who baked the first one," he said as a customer bit into a hot 
roll threaded with sticks of peeled, long-cut pepperoni. "We don't say that. 
But we're pretty sure it was an Italian thing, at least to start."

Most informed eaters here know the early script: In advance of clambering 
into a dank and dark coal seam, Italian miners loaded tin pails with hunks 
of hearth-baked bread as well as various American takes on Italian salumi, 
from bologna to pepperoni.

>From there, it was a short evolutionary step to selling commercially baked 
pepperoni rolls in taverns and country stores to shift workers in need of 
cheap and portable food.

(Some locals tell stories of bakeries that tried to market other meat-filled 
buns and rolls, stuffed with everything from salami to ham, but it seems 
that, by the late 1930s, pepperoni was the preferred filling.)

Mr. Brunett talks of pepperoni rolls as peculiar totems of Italian-American 
identity in West Virginia. And he's right.

But their size and utility are comparable to a number of hand-held foods, 
engineered for on-the-job consumption by miners.

Meat-and-potato-stuffed pasties, popular on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, 
where copper mining was once important, have their likely origins in the tin 
mines of Cornwall, England.

The variously flavored Moon Pies of Tennessee were, according to Chattanooga 
Bakery company lore, developed by a route salesman for the lunch pails of 
Kentucky coal miners.

Today, although a mechanized mining industry employs far fewer laborers than 
it once did, the Italian presence in the northern reaches of West Virginia 
remains formidable. (By one estimate, nearly 40 percent of Clarksburg 
residents claim some Italian ancestry.)

A sign in front of Mama's Country Kitchen, in downtown Clarksburg, 
advertises "Italian style foods," not meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

 Oliverio's Cash & Carry, a specialty foods manufacturer, packs sweet 
peppers in tomato sauce and sells them statewide to red-sauce restaurants 
and hot dog huts alike.

But here the bread is the tell. And the idiom is peculiar to West Virginia.

Here par-baked Sicilian-style pizza crusts are sold ready to be filled with 
sauce, cheese and toppings and baked on cookie sheets.

Hamburger patties with American cheese and sweet peppers, built on bases of 
thick-sliced bread from Tomaro's or one of the other Italian bakeries, are 
sold - by checkered tablecloth spaghetti houses and carhop burger joints 
alike - as Giovanni sandwiches.

Tomaro's is the oldest survivor of the days when coal camps teemed with 
Italian immigrants who stoked beehive ovens with oak logs. But it's not the 
only one. Home Industry Bakery of Clarksburg - which owes its 
counterintuitive name to a Depression-era beginning as a business that sold 
home baked goods for local women - bakes pepperoni rolls that, when hot, 
ooze with pepper cheese. And Abruzzino's in nearby Gypsy bakes pepperoni 
rolls that look like elongated dinner rolls, with cottony interiors that 
brim with folded slices of meat.

Relative upstarts like Brake's Dairy King in Buckhannon, on the southern 
fringe of the pepperoni-roll corridor, do not hew to the dictates of 
tradition.

The proprietor, Chris Brake, who claims no Italian heritage and who has been 
baking rolls since just 1998, takes great pride in his rolls, which he says 
are so labor intensive that he can manage to bake only on Thursdays.

Mr. Brake has an expansive view of how to serve them. "You can nuke these in 
the microwave," he said of his rolls, which are broader and heftier than the 
style found in Clarksburg. "They can take it. My rolls can take anything. 
I'll split them open and pile anything on. I'll put ice cream in the 
son-of-a-gun if somebody wants one that way."

The loaded roll - smothered in chili, capped with cheese - may foretell the 
future. Chris Pallotta, the current proprietor of Country Club Bakery in 
Fairmont, founded in 1927 by Giuseppe Argiro as People's Bakery and touted 
by many as the origin point of the pepperoni roll, doesn't seem to mind that 
his artisanalquality baked goods are considered by many customers to be mere 
foils for all manner of condiments.

One morning, as two giant shop fans cooled racks of fresh-baked pepperoni 
rolls, he talked of tailgating at Mountaineer Field on the campus of West 
Virginia University, in Morgantown.

"On football Saturdays, I see my rolls everywhere," he said. "They split 
them open and stuff them with provolone and peppers and wrap them in tin 
foil. I see them put scoops of hot dog chili on top."

Like Chris Brake, he sees in today's post-coal-mining economy the prospect 
for continued relevancy as a new generation of consumers applies an 
avalanche of American condiments to his Italian-American pepperoni rolls.

"I don't care how they use them," said Mr. Pallotta, who dresses his own 
rolls with Oliverio's peppers. "I'm

just glad to see that they're starting with pepperoni rolls."

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joyce Porter" <joyce.m.porter at verizon.net>
To: "'NFB of West Virginia Discussion List'" <nfbwv-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 2:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Nfbwv-talk] WV in NY Times

> En:  Do you know how to make them?  I really like them a lot but have 
> never
> made them.  We could make them and sell them for WV NAPUB.
> Joyce
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nfbwv-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbwv-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org]
> On Behalf Of Karen McDonald
> Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 2:48 PM
> To: NFB of West Virginia Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [Nfbwv-talk] WV in NY Times
>
> Darren, Thanks for giving Calasessano's the credit it deserves.
> Those pepperoni rolls are the best in town.  I still miss them.
> Fairmont is the originator of pepperoni rolls.  When my oldest
> son was in Hawaai in the Marines we sent him a dozen pepperoni
> rolls for Christmas because that's what he asked for.
>
> Karen
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>From: Darren Burton <dburton at afb.net
>>To: NFB of West Virginia Discussion List <nfbwv-talk at nfbnet.org
>>Date sent: Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:30:27 +0000
>>Subject: Re: [Nfbwv-talk] WV in NY Times
>
>>Hi Dave,
>>Thanks for the post.  Nice to see that uppity city-slicker rag
> covering some real culture.  I really miss the great pepperoni
> rolls of my youth in that area.  Calasessano's had the best in
> Fairmont, and Ray's Pastries had the best in Morgantown.  Makes
> me want to move back home.
>
>>Darren
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: nfbwv-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org
> [mailto:nfbwv-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of David Andrews
>>Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 1:12 PM
>>To: nfbwv-talk at nfbnet.org
>>Subject: [Nfbwv-talk] WV in NY Times
>
>>In the New York times for September 30, in the Dining in/Dining
> Out section there is an article on West Virginia and the
> pepperoni roll.  I read it on NFB NEWSLINE.
>
>>It is a good article.  I enjoyed reading it -- was introduced to
> the Pepperoni Roll in Fairmont by the Program Director of WWVA
> Radio in
>>1975 -- was doing a college internship there.  We were driving
> around West Virginia listening to radio stations scoping out disc
> jockeys, and he had to stop in his boyhood bakery to buy us some,
> yum.
>
>>Dave
>
>
>>That paper will be on NEWSLINE through today.
>
>>Dave
>
>
>
>>David Andrews and white cane Harry.
>
>
>
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>
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