On a roll
“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.”
I wish I could embed a smell on this page. My mom baked pepperoni rolls this afternoon for a neighbor who had a death in the family and now the whole house smells like warm, fresh bread.
I’m not a coal miner’s daugher. In fact, I’m only a West Virginian because this is where my father happened to land a job after college. But I’m true blue and gold when it comes to these rolls.
And ours aren’t classic rolls like the kind you get in Fairmont or Clarksburg in convenience stores, dense and a little clammy from sweating in their cellophane packages.
My mom’s recipe was informed by a sense of this place, but it’s tweaked a little to suite who we are. They’re golden and flaky instead of moist. The pepperoni’s turkey instead of the spicy salami.
I’ll still stop to pick up the former at gas stations and I’ll bribe hometown visitors to bring a few as housewarming gifts. They taste like early Saturday mornings strolling home from the bar in college and like Sundays spent at city desk in Charleston, listening to the police scanner.
But when I bake ‘em, I’ll be baking this kind.
