When Italian immigrants came to work in the West Virginia coal mines during the early 1900s, their contributions went far beyond the energy sector. They also made a lasting mark on the Mountain State’s culture.
One tantalizing example: the pepperoni roll, the ultra-popular if unofficial state food.
Similar in some ways to a calzone or stromboli, the pepperoni roll is precisely what its name implies: spicy cured meat, rolled into a traditional Italian-style dough, and baked to a fragrant, flavorful brilliance. Die-hard fans will tell you the best part is the tender, orange-tinted interior, where the bread melds with the pepperoni grease.
A miner-turned-baker from Calabria, Giuseppe “Joseph” Argiro, is widely credited as the creator of the West Virginia pepperoni roll, introducing his signature baked good sometime between 1927 and 1938. The story goes that Argiro noticed many of his fellow miners bringing bread and pepperoni to work and decided to combine the two into a single, satisfying, easy-to-carry, hard-to-spoil lunch item for sale. The business he started in downtown Fairmont, originally called the People’s Bakery, later relocated and renamed the Country Club Bakery, still makes hundreds of pepperoni rolls daily and is generally regarded as the standard-bearer.
Making pepperoni rolls at Country Club Bakery in West Virginia. Credit: Candace Nelson
Other Italian bakeries operating around the same time, notably the long-standing Tomaro’s Bakery in Clarksburg, also lay claim to the origin story, but the true innovators may be more domestic.
“It was most likely the wives of coal miners that were creating these little pieces of deliciousness first in their home kitchens,” says Candace Nelson, author of The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll, published in 2017. “Then it was the bakeries that were able to commercialize them.”
Nowadays, you can hardly travel down one of the state’s famed “Country Roads” without encountering the pepperoni roll in some form. Besides the various Italian bakeries that specialize in making them, pepperoni rolls are also sold at gas stations, grocery stores, sit-down restaurants, sporting events, even donut shops. They come in all kinds: mini-sized pepperoni rolls, double-stuffed pepperoni rolls, pepperoni rolls with cheese, pepperoni rolls with peppers, pepperoni rolls with ramps, deep-fried pepperoni rolls with a side of marinara.
Local festivals feature pepperoni roll-themed events, such as the Pepperoni Roll Eating World Championship. (The renowned Joey “Jaws” Chestnut once consumed 43 in 10 minutes!) The minor-league West Virginia Black Bears baseball team has pepperoni roll-costumed mascots running around its ballpark.
But, as ubiquitous as they seem in West Virginia, pepperoni rolls are largely unheard of anywhere else, making this simple food a source of great longing for those who move out of state—even the institutional version served in school cafeterias. “Folks that grew up here are still super-passionate about the school pepperoni roll,” says Nelson, a West Virginia native, who notes that one school district’s popular pepperoni roll recipe has circulated widely on social media. “It may not be quite the same thing that you get in a bakery, but because it sparks so much nostalgia, some folks say it tastes even better.”
Country Club Bakery Pepperoni Roll. Credit: Candace Nelson
The path to pepperoni roll nirvana has posed its challenges. In 1987, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to impose new rules on the state’s pepperoni roll makers by treating them like meat-processing facilities, with costly regulations that threatened to put small bakeries out of business.
Swift opposition by West Virginia lawmakers in Congress ultimately quashed the regulators’ burdensome plan, but local bakeries did not escape federal oversight entirely.
“I personally cut pepperoni for 20 years until the government got involved,” says fourth-generation baker Chris D’Annunzio, whose great-grandfather founded Clarksburg’s Health Bread Company, now known as D’Annunzio’s Italian Bread, back in 1931.
Like many of the state’s old-school bakers, D’Annunzio prefers to use slim, stick-shaped cuts, chopped from large hunks of pepperoni, as opposed to the thin, circular slices that are commonly used as pizza toppings. Other producers argue that slices are more economical and provide more coverage as well as more oil to infuse the bread, but D’Annunzio says that tradition, quality, and personal preference make him a “stick man” all the way. “They didn’t go with little slices into the mines,” he says, adding that sticks also offer a better texture. “It’s more chewy.”
D’Annunzio now relies on a federally inspected pepperoni supplier for his customary sausage strips: “He cuts it into sticks like we want.”
The most important thing about pepperoni rolls, other than the quality of ingredients, is to get them while they’re fresh out of the oven, D’Annunzio says: “I bet you can’t eat just one.”
Regulatory hurdles and the rarity of pepperoni rolls beyond state borders have combined to create a certain mythology around West Virginia’s iconic foodstuff. One common misconception is that pepperoni rolls are restricted or even illegal in other states, like neighboring Virginia.
Nelson debunks this myth in her book. “Maybe at one point that might have been true, but certainly not now,” she says, citing the confirmation of Virginia’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
“In West Virginia, as well as every surrounding state, they’re perfectly legal. Does that mean that it’s right to have them outside of West Virginia? I don’t know about that.”