For generations, Skeenies Hot Dogs in Sissonville, West Virginia, was known for serving some of the best slaw dogs around. The restaurant closed in 2018 — but still comes alive for the annual Skeenies Tribute Sale. Folkways reporter Zack Harold has this story.
Donald White used to be a Skeenies Hot Dogs regular, swinging by in his wrecker on his way to rescue a stranded motorist.
“Everybody would get in my wrecker and they’d say, ‘You ate at Skeenies didn’t you?’” he says. “Because it’s got the smell that nobody else (does). The onions, they stay in your car.”
Then, in March 2018, owner Andy Skeen died of a short illness at just 59 years old. He had no children, leaving his sister Karen as the only one left who knew the family recipe for Skeenies’ legendary chili and slaw.
About a month before her brother passed, Karen asked him about carrying on that legacy.
“He said, ‘No, let it go ahead and die with me,’” Karen says.
Long ago, Andy and Karen’s father — Andy Sr., the restaurant’s founder — sought to make Skeenies a nationwide brand. He eventually had the restaurant franchised in 13 states but found that the bigger the company got, the harder it was to control the quality of the product. So, he yanked the franchise licenses and vowed that only his direct descendants would ever operate Skeenies.
Karen’s brother took over the place when he got older. But at her family’s encouragement, she made a life outside the food business, becoming a successful court reporter.
And even though she would now be the last to carry on that legacy, her brother was adamant that running the restaurant would be too much for her.
“He said, ‘I don’t want you working in here like we did seven days a week, all these hours, worrying all the time with it,’” Karen says.
The Skeenies crewmembers construct their hot dogs on metal fingers that make it easier to slide the paper sleeves over top.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Seeing the restaurant close was hard on fans like Donald White. He would fantasize about pulling in and grabbing a couple of those onion-heavy hotdogs.
“I live right out the road there. I told the old lady all the time, ‘I’m going to stop and get a Skeenies hot dog,’” he says.
It was hard on Karen, too.
“It’s a part of me. It’s an integral part of me,” she says. “And I just felt sad to let it go.”
So she decided she just wouldn’t let it go.
Karen lives in Florida but still comes back to West Virginia each Thanksgiving to see her extended family. So, in the days leading up to Thanksgiving 2022, she made 40 gallons of chili. She chopped 100 pounds of cabbage to make slaw and ordered 2,000 wieners and buns.
On that Black Friday, Karen flicked on the neon “OPEN” sign. The line of customers didn’t end for 10 straight hours.
“We didn’t expect the crowds. We were out of everything the first day,” Karen says. “We were sitting there — what are we going to do? We have to get more hotdogs. We have to get more buns. We have to make more chili.”
She still had one more day of the sale to go. That night, she dispatched her cousins to buy ingredients from local grocery stores. Knowing she couldn’t sling hotdogs for another 10 hours all by herself, Karen also called in reinforcements.
Linda Troup worked for the restaurant for several years in the 2000s, and Karen knew she was one of the best employees they had.
“She messaged me and said, ‘Linda, can you come help?’” Troup says.
The next day, she was right there in the trenches with Karen. Since then, Troup has returned each Thanksgiving weekend to help Karen run the annual Skeenies Tribute Sale.
“This is the best two days for me. It really is,” she says. “I enjoy it. I mean my back is hurting but it’s worth it.”
Karen has recruited a few more helpers through the years, but it remains a skeleton crew. Despite that, they made 3,500 hot dogs during 2024’s two-day sale.
The flood of customers and small staff leads to long days and long lines. But nobody in the kitchen seems to mind.
“We’re all dead,” Karen told West Virginia Public Broadcasting while making hot dogs. “I asked my team about an hour ago, ‘Do you guys think I should do it again next year?’”
The answer was a resounding “yes.”
Karen Skeen keeps her family’s famous “indescribably different” hot dog recipe alive with an annual tribute sale.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
They do it for the same reason Karen’s dad was such a stickler for quality. They want to make the customers happy. And despite the long wait, the customers are.
“They wait an hour and a half in the cold, in the snow, and they thank us,” Karen says.
Michael Hutchinson is used to waiting in front of Skeenies. This is where he used to catch the school bus.
“I was into drawing and I drew a race car. She had it taped right here for a lot of years. I put Skeenies on the quarter panel of it,” he says. “So I got free hot dogs every now and again when nobody was around.”
In 2024, Hutchinson brought his 15-year-old daughter Antoinette to have her own Skeenies dog.
“People think it’s a hot dog, it’s more than just a hot dog. You don’t see a line like this at Dairy Queen. It’s childhood coming back,” he says.
Despite the cold, patrons are willing to wait for a taste of Skeenies Hot Dogs.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
That’s true for Karen, too.
“When I would come home to visit them, I would come to this restaurant before I went in the house. Because that’s where I would always find them,” she says. “And so when I have these sales, I feel like it’s where I still find them.”
With the sale over, Skeenies sits darkened for another year. There’s nowhere to buy the “indescribably different” slaw dogs advertised on the billboard above the little restaurant.
Karen hopes to bring the restaurant back to life in November. Until then, memories will have to suffice.
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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia.Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
Folkways Reporter Zack Harold recently made a trip to the small town of New Vrindaban, in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. It’s a Hare Krishna community started in the late 60s. These days, the town is home to a few hundred permanent residents, but thousands of pilgrims visit each year. They come to worship in the temple — and to visit the opulent Palace of Gold. But those main attractions were a pretty small part of Zack’s trip. He ended up spending much of his time in the kitchen.
If you’re looking for food in New Vrindaban — the Hare Krishna community founded in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle in the late 1960s — chances are your GPS will point you toward Govinda’s.
It’s a happening spot: an Indian-inspired vegetarian restaurant in the middle-of-nowhere West Virginia, just beside the community’s temple and a few miles from the opulent Palace of Gold.
But a trip to Govinda’s doesn’t offer a complete picture of the food traditions here in New Vrindaban. Food is central to the Hare Krishna faith, its traditions and worship. And Govinda’s is just one part of that.
“We do everything with food,” says Vasu Dev, who manages Govinda’s. “That’s why they call us the kitchen religion.”
To really learn about the food of New Vrindaban, you have to spend time in three different kitchens — each a little more sacred than the last.
The Restaurant Kitchen
The cooks at Govinda’s are deep into prep for the lunch rush. Cooks are swarming around, stirring pots and chopping vegetables. There is a small TV in the corner playing Indian ragas. But other than that, the kitchen is quiet.
There is no joking, no bellyaching, no idle chit chat at all. The kitchen staff is trying to keep their minds on God.
“Whatever consciousness you have when you’re preparing something, that’s going to be translated into the food,” Dev says. “If you’re cooking in a happy state, in a God-conscious state, people who are eating that are going to get the benefit.”
Dev comes from a big Italian Catholic family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, so the kitchens he grew up in were anything but quiet. He noticed Hare Krishna cooks did things a little differently after he joined the International Society of Krishna Consciousness in college. And it wasn’t just about the volume level.
“I remember the cooks (I grew up with), while they’re cooking, they’re tasting. ‘OK, let me taste this salt. Let me see how spicy it is.’ But we don’t do that,” Dev says.
You’ll never see a cook in Govinda’s kitchen tasting a sauce or even wafting the smell of a dish.
“We offer to God, to Krishna, and then we taste it,” Dev says. “When we’re preparing something, we’re preparing with a consciousness that we’re offering this to God.”
Before human tongue tastes any of the food prepared here, one of the cooks will present samples of each dish before a small altar that is set up on top of one of the kitchen’s coolers. The cook will then chant a mantra and ring a bell. They wait a few minutes, and then everyone else can enjoy the food as well.
“By doing that you get the blessings,” Dev says. “And when you eat that, your body is not only getting nutrients your body needs, but the spiritual benefit as well.”
A cook prepares lunch in Govinda’s, an Indian-inspired vegetarian restaurant in New Vrindaban, West Virginia.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Govinda’s serves up a lot of this spiritually-infused food, providing lunch and dinner to the dozens of pilgrims who visit each week. Much of the menu is Indian-inspired and — in keeping with Hare Krishna dietary restrictions — Govinda’s only serves vegetarian food. It’s a lot of healthy grains and legumes like rice and lentils, and lots and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.
The International Society for Krishna Consciousness runs the largest vegetarian food distribution program in the world. It was born from an experience Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, the movement’s founder, had when he was trying to get a temple built in Mayapur, India.
Prabhupada and his followers cooked rice for the people there, serving it on leaves. After they were done, they threw those leaves into a pile.
“He saw some kid looking into the trash for some food. And he said ‘That’s no good. Any person who lives around 10 miles of the temple should be fed by us,’” Dev says. “So out of that, a program called ‘Food for Life’ was born. Now it’s all around the world.”
That’s why seven days a week, 365 days a year, New Vrindaban provides a free breakfast and lunch to anyone who wants a seat at the table — whether you’re a resident, a pilgrim, or just someone in need of a meal.
But that food does not come from Govinda’s restaurant kitchen. To see where these meals are prepared, you’ve got to head next door to the temple.
The Devotee Kitchen
When Saci Suta gets up in the morning — usually around 4:00 a.m. — he showers to make himself ritually clean, then heads down to the temple to pray.
“We chant, then we keep ourselves pure, then we come to the kitchen,” Suta says.
Suta runs New Vrindaban’s devotee kitchen. Each day, he consults with the temple president to see how many pilgrims stayed the night in the community’s lodge. Add to that any new cars that might be in the parking lot, and any full-time residents who might come down to the temple to eat.
On the day I visited, Suta was preparing breakfast for 120 people and lunch for 150. Luckily, he has a good bit of help. Just before daybreak, a parade of volunteers file into the devotee kitchen. They slip on some hairnets and with a little instruction, they set to work.
Devotees wash potatoes, chop pineapples, quarter oranges and dice jalapeños for curries, salads and quinoa. The kitchen gets some vegetables delivered from a local grower and uses some store-bought ingredients. But Suta also uses lots of vegetables grown on the property: milk from the community’s cows and dairy products, like ghee and yogurt, made from that milk.
The devotee kitchen is full of volunteers, but talking remains at a minimum as cooks try to keep their minds on God.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The volunteer cooks remain quiet while they work, just like the cooks in the restaurant kitchen. They have come from all over — Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan and Toronto, Canada — driving for hours and hours just to spend a few days here in the mountains.
Suta said that’s common. Devotees come to New Vrindaban from everywhere. People who can’t make it to the holy places in India are able to come here and receive the same spiritual benefit.
“That’s why everybody comes here,” Suta says.
It’s no wonder, then, that these pilgrims are more than happy to roll up their sleeves and help out in the kitchen.
When the food is done, Suta plates a sample of each dish into a small aluminum bowl. Those bowls go onto a 12 inch aluminum platter, which is placed before some fresh flowers, and images of Krishna and his consort, Radha and Prabhupada. Then, with the ringing of a bell and the chanting of a mantra, Suta offers the food to Krishna.
Saci Suta offers food to Krishna in the devotee kitchen. Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Suta and his rotating kitchen crew go through this routine 730 times a year. But there are some jobs here volunteers can’t do — aren’t allowedto do.
Just down the hall from the devotee kitchen, behind a closed but unassuming door, is another kitchen.
Normally only the most committed devotees are allowed inside. But they made an exception for me, so I could see the kitchen where God’s food is prepared.
The Deity Kitchen
The cooks in New Vrindaban’s restaurant and devotee kitchens try to use the best ingredients in their cooking. But here in the deity kitchen, everything is held to a higher standard.
“Except for olive oil and lemon juice, you won’t find anything canned or preserved in here,” says Anurhada Imseng, New Vrindaban’s communications director. “Everything is made fresh.”
It’s not just the ingredients: the pots, pans and utensils used in the deity kitchen are used here and nowhere else. They don’t even share a dishwasher with items from the other kitchens.
Instead of the stainless steel dishes used in the restaurant and devotee kitchens, here Krishna dines from pure silver dishes. Everything is set aside for God, including the chef.
Rohini Kumar is from Peru. He’s known as a “twice-initiated” devotee. He’s taken additional vows to the faith, and as such has a special mantra that he chants three times a day. That allows him to prepare food for Krishna in this sanctified kitchen space.
“The idea is to meditate on Krishna. Everything you’re doing is dedicated to Krishna. I’m very happy cooking for the deity,” Kumar says.
Each day when he arrives, he sees what fresh vegetables are available. He lets his ingredients tell him what to cook.
Once everything is ready, he transfers the food to the silver serving dishes. All plated up, they look like an appetizer platter someone ordered for their lunch. And now it’s ready for the table.
Rohini Kumar prepares food in New Vrindaban’s deity kitchen.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A Hare Krishna temple service is a multi-sensory experience. You hear the sound of conch shells, drumming, cymbals, chanting and singing. The smell of incense fills your nose. The shrine itself is visually overwhelming, with intricate wood and metalwork, stained glass and paintings.
It’s in this setting that devotees make a series of offerings. They change the clothes on the images of Krishna and Radha, removing their pajamas and putting on their day clothes. They wake up the deities with good morning prayers and small pieces of milk candy made in the deity kitchen. They offer fresh flowers and the elements of earth, wind, fire and water.
Finally, they offer the food Kumar has prepared. Devotees leave the plates before the statues of the deities for a short while so Krishna and Radha can enjoy them. Then a devotee takes the food back into the kitchen area where it is transferred out of the holy dishes and into less sanctified food containers. Then it can be eaten by anyone.
“It becomes really, intensively sanctified food,” Imseng says. “Everyone gets to eat it. Whoever gets there first gets to eat it.”
Food prepared for Krishna in the deity kitchen, served on pure silver dishes.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A Secret Fourth Kitchen?
The day before I arrived in New Vrindaban, Imseng texted me with a few requests.
She asked that I keep myself ritually pure by showering when I woke up and putting on clean clothes. She also asked that I refrain from eating anything. Coffee was okay, thankfully.
On the day of my visit, I reported for hours before breakfast was served. I watched cooks prepare mounds of beautiful, fragrant food — and tried not to enjoy the sight or smell, out of respect for my hosts. Despite my efforts, I found it increasingly difficult to be conscious of anything but my hunger.
You can imagine my relief when Imseng approached me with a paper plate, heaped with food.
From the devotee kitchen there was a vegetable curry, some quinoa and Suta’s special buckwheat banana bread. From the deity kitchen, was an extra-sanctified potato pancake, some of those milk candies offered to Krishna as a morning snack and paneer cheese.
On nice days, the community dines outdoors on picnic tables in front of the temple. There’s also a dining hall inside the temple. It was pretty empty on the day I visited, so that’s where I ate, since I was recording my meal for the radio.
I dug in with vigor. I’m not sure I could taste the spiritual aspect of the food, but it was evident these dishes were prepared with quality ingredients and a lot of care and attention.
Once my plate was clean, my hunger satiated and my attention renewed, I noticed someone else in the dining hall. It was Raghavacharya Das, his wife Mansi and their two children. The family moved here just three months ago. They came from Silicon Valley, where she was a research scientist at Stanford and he worked at a financial technology startup. Now they are full time devotees.
As I was explaining the premise of this story, Raghavacharya shocked me.
“There is a fourth kitchen you have not heard of,” he told me. “If you take that food, it’s a totally different level of purity.”
I asked if he could show me this secret kitchen. But he said I didn’t quite understand what he meant. This fourth kitchen doesn’t stay in one place.
“It’s not a kitchen you can go and see,” Raghavacharya said. “It’s devotees who are cooking for senior disciples who are really old and not able to cook for themselves. Different devotees do it on a rotating basis in their homes. That food is prepared just with love. There is no other motivation.
Mansi said these meals are prepared exclusively with vegetables grown in the community’s sanctified soil.
“We don’t just get any vegetables from supermarkets. [We cook] simple squashes and beans, just cooked in ghee. Ghee and love,” she says.
As Mansi explained how this secret fourth kitchen works, I thought it sounded a lot like Kumar’s work in the deity kitchen.
They’re cooking simple, filling meals with wholesome, healthy ingredients — and doing that behind the scenes, without any recognition or praise.
This fourth-kitchen food, cooked in “ghee and love,” isn’t prepared for God. It isn’t cooked within the walls of a temple. But it is prepared for the most vulnerable people in their community.
The way I see it, you won’t find food much more sacred than that.
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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia.Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
There’s nothing like the smell of freshly baked cinnamon rolls straight out of the oven. A baker in West Virginia borrows from her Finnish family roots to put a new twist on this traditional treat. Folkways Reporter Zack Harold has the story.
Sometimes, when I open my front door, I find a little aluminum pie plate there on my front step. Without looking, I know what’s under the clear plastic lid: several little cinnamon rolls, drenched in icing.
But this isn’t the work of Doordash or UberEats. It’s a delivery from my down-the-street neighbor Kim Kerr. She makes these cinnamon rolls — and a lot of other good stuff — to sell at farmers markets around Charleston, West Virginia through her small business Whimsy and Willows.
She brings my family the ugly, misshapen ones that she can’t sell. But I can attest, they taste just fine.
After a couple years of these surprise deliveries, I finally asked her how she got into the cinnamon roll business. The story, it turns out, involved some real detective work. She invited me and my microphone over to hear the tale while she made a batch.
This all started when Kerr and her husband Patrick launched their business. It was a little rough going at first.
“We started with jam and realized everybody has jam,” Kerr says. “I like baking, so I was like ‘Well, I will get some of Sylvia’s recipes.’ Because she had phenomenal recipes.”
Sylvia Iuukko-Mann is Kerr’s great aunt. And she was the family baker. Whether she came to visit Kerr’s parents, or they saw her at family reunions in Massachusetts, Sylvia was always baking up a storm.
“We would have to go to the store with Sylvia and buy packets of yeast and buy all of this stuff,” Kerr says.
Kim Kerr points to her great-aunt Sylvia Iuukko-Mann — the family baker — on a hand-drawn family tree.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
She made everything, from dinner rolls to gargantuan wedding cakes. But her speciality — and the family’s favorite — was nisu, a sweet braided cardamom-flavored yeast bread native to Finland.
“Finnish people are big on drinking coffee, so it’s a coffee bread. So it was just always, always there,” Kerr says.
Like nisu, Kerr’s family is originally from Finland. Her great-grandfather Matti Iuukko, Sylvia’s father, immigrated from there as part of a wave of European immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
While Matti and his family ended up in Massachusetts, a small but mighty group of Finns ended up in central Appalachia. These Finnish immigrants made their home largely in southwestern Pennsylvania, where they established community groups, churches and even a support organization to help one another pay for medical expenses and funerals. An offshoot of that group moved down to Weirton, Clarksburg and Charleston to work in steel mills and foundries.
The Finnish culture here disappeared as people either moved off when the work dried up or stayed and assimilated into the larger culture. Kerr’s family, meanwhile, was able to stay connected to their roots and often attended Finnish heritage festivals down in Florida, where nisu was a regular feature. But none of it tasted quite as good Sylvia’s.
“Hers is more ooey-gooey, is the best way we can describe it,” Kerr says.
She wanted to bring some of that ooey-gooey goodness to her farmers market stand. There were just a few problems. For one, she’d never made nisu before — or any kind of bread. But more importantly, Sylvia wasn’t around anymore to teach her how to make it.
Kerr got in touch with one of Sylvia’s nieces, the family’s de facto historian. She was able to track down one of Sylvia’s recipe cards. But it wasn’t quite complete.
The card listed the ingredients. It told Kerr what temperature to set her oven to. But it contained no directions. Kerr took what information she could glean from that card and filled in the gaps with nisu recipes she found online, and made her first attempt at her childhood favorite.
“It wasn’t a disaster but it wasn’t right,” she says.
It wasn’t that ooey, gooey texture she remembered. So she reached out to Larry Mann, one of Sylvia’s sons. He found another incomplete recipe. This one had ingredients, but not the measurements for them, though it didhave the steps.
“She taught enough people that I was able to put it kinda sorta together,” Kerr says.
This new recipe fragment revealed a few of Sylvia’s tricks. The milk must be almost boiling, and have butter melted into it. And unlike what some online recipes say, you can’t add everything to the stand mixer at once.
The first batch she made following her dear aunt Sylvia’s order of operations turned out perfect. It was just as ooey and gooey as she remembered. Sylvia’s son Larry agreed.
“He comes to visit us every few years and he will say ‘This is just like my mother’s. This is my mother’s,’” Kerr says. “The first time he said that I was like, ‘Good. We nailed it.’”
In reviving her family favorite, Kerr — who moved to West Virginia in 2007 — had also unknowingly brought back a dish that once would have been common in certain parts of the state.
Kerr places a freshly-braided loaf of nisu on a baking sheet, ready for the oven.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
It wasn’t long after Kerr cracked the nisu code that inspiration struck for a new twist on the family favorite.
It was 2020. Like all of us, Kerr was stuck at home during COVID lockdowns. She got a hankering for some cinnamon rolls, but couldn’t go anywhere to get them. So she decided to make her own.
“I’m looking up recipes for cinnamon rolls and it’s calling for yeast bread,” Kerr says. “And I thought, ‘I don’t know how to make yeast bread.’” But I know how to make nisu which has yeast and it’s a bread. I wonder if I can make that into a cinnamon roll.”
Instead of forming the dough into long snakes and braiding it together, as she does for nisu, Kerr rolled the dough into a flat square and covered it with melted butter and a cinnamon-sugar mixture. She rolled it into a log, cut that log into medallions and put those medallions in pie pans to rise for about 45 minutes. Then she put them in the oven.
It turns out that sweet, ooey-gooey nisu dough made perfectcinnamon rolls. There was still one piece missing, though. She needed icing to go on top.
Kerr originally considered a cream cheese icing, but West Virginia cottage food laws forbid items that require refrigeration. She went online and found a recipe for a shelf stable alternative. It involves a whole bunch of sugar, a whole stick of melted butter and four teaspoons of vanilla.
“But I kind of cheat and do more than four,” Kerr says.
Those ingredients get whipped together in the stand mixer and drizzled generously over piping hot cinnamon rolls.
“Nobody’s ever eaten a cinnamon roll and said ‘That’s too much icing,’” Kerr says. “We’ve seen otherwise prim and proper people who will lick the pan when they think no one’s looking.”
It wasn’t long before the cinnamon rolls — which Kerr’s husband dubbed “Finn-amon” rolls — became her most popular item.
Kerr prepares a pan of “Finn-amon” rolls for the oven.
“I think my favorite compliment was the teenage boy who took a sample. He was definitely a farm boy and had his boots and everything,” Kerr says. “He turned around and came back and said ‘These are the best cinnamon rolls I’ve ever had in my life’ and bought some more.”
Kerr is now taking steps to make sure this new family favorite isn’t lost to time, as great-aunt Sylvia’s recipe almost was. Her 13-year-old son Jackson has recently shown an interest in baking, so she plans to put him to work on the Finn-amon roll assembly line.
But if anyone else in the family wants to give it a try…they might run into an issue.
“I don’t have an actual recipe that I follow, I just mix it together,” Kerr says. “I should write it down. I will have to do that.”
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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia.Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
Food has a way of carrying our deepest memories, and for Chef William Dissen, those memories are seasoned with the flavors of West Virginia’s mountains. Now, at his James Beard-nominated restaurant, The Market Place in Asheville, NC, Dissen transforms those Appalachian traditions into award-winning cuisine.
This conversation originally aired in the Nov. 24, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.
Food has a way of carrying our deepest memories, and for Chef William Dissen, those memories are seasoned with the flavors of West Virginia’s mountains. Now, at his James Beard-nominated restaurant, The Market Place in Asheville, North Carolina, Dissen transforms those Appalachian traditions into award-winning cuisine.
Named “Green Chef of the Year” twice by FORTUNE magazine, Dissen has built his reputation on sustainable cooking practices and supporting local food systems throughout the Appalachian region. As a Seafood Watch Ambassador and member of the American Chefs Corps, he advocates for food policy and promotes sustainable American food culture nationally and internationally.
Folkways Reporter Margaret Leef caught up with the chef at Charleston’s Capitol Market, where he shared how his mountain roots inspired his debut cookbook, Thoughtful Cooking: Recipes Rooted in the New South.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Leef: You write about learning to garden and cook alongside your grandmother in West Virginia. What was a typical day with her, from picking vegetables to getting dinner on the table?
Dissen: One of my most vivid memories, just as a human but also as a chef, is growing up and being at my grandmother Jane’s farm in Sandyville, West Virginia. [My grandparents] lived up in the holler, and they had a nice house and garden right along the creek side. Their garden had bees to pollinate the garden, and they had a canning shed adjacent to the garden and a small barn.
One of my most vivid memories was peak summer, probably mid-August — you could feel the humidity hanging in the holler. And my grandmother said, “All right, Billy, go get some corn.” And I remember running out in the field and waddling back as a young kid, arm full of corn. And we sat on the front porch and shucked it. And she had a pot of salt water going on the stove, and we boiled it. I remember slathering it, probably with Country Crock, and putting some salt on it. And my head exploded off my shoulders, and it was like, I’ve never tasted corn before until this day. It was really inspiring because I felt like I learned something about food and connection to nature and why things taste a certain way when they’re grown locally, fresh and ripe. And that didn’t really hit me until later in life. It’s a moment I think back about quite a bit.
Leef: So, those experiences clearly shaped how you cook today.
Dissen: One hundred percent. Fast forward — I’m very fortunate — I went to culinary school at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, and when I was there, 13 master chefs were teaching. To put it in perspective, there are only about 65 [master chefs] in the world. So, I was very blessed to have some of the best chefs teaching me. I remember this one French chef, and I won’t imitate his accent, but he said, “If you want to be the best chef, you have to use the best ingredients.”
At the time, he was using things like foie gras, truffles and caviar. As I formulated my palette as a chef and the recipe repertoire that I wanted to use, I had an “aha” moment, really regressing back and remembering that experience at my grandmother’s farm and thinking, “You know, if I want to be the best chef, I need to use fresh ingredients, because fresh is best.”
Leef: You’ve written your first cookbook. I’m wondering why it’s important to you to have written this cookbook. And also, why now?
Dissen: For years, I was trying to figure out what my story was to tell. Being from Appalachia, we’re all storytellers here, right? There’s a lot of written history and a lot of verbal history. But, for me, the story was about the connection to our community, to the heritage we have here in Appalachia, and to the connection we have to the earth.
I’m not a Greenpeace hippie by any means, but what I learned from my grandparents was about the importance of taking care of nature and taking care of your community. For them, they didn’t poison their fields with chemicals because they wanted to be able to till and grow. There were weeds in the fields, and they said, “Those weeds are good, we till them back into the field, they add nutrition into the soil.” Honey bees to pollinate the garden … These were things that I didn’t understand as a child.
If you look at that connection to nature, you realize it’s all very cyclical and connected. After my travels, educating myself, and finding my way back to Asheville and Appalachia, I started having these “aha” moments. I love city life. I love the energy, the noise in the city and the people. But when you get into the mountains, you can get lost in the woods and take a hike and listen to a stream or waterfall. There’s this connection you have that you don’t get anywhere else.
The beauty of Appalachia, really, was kind of calling me home. Finding myself back there, it felt like I had this story to tell people about that — from being able to travel around the world and travel around the country. People have these ideas of who we are as Appalachians — hillbillies or rednecks, we’re all related to one another … But I think when they get here, they visit and meet people like us. They realize that we are some of the best people around — in our culture, in our history — and our heritage is really deep.
Chef William Dissen’s debut cookbook is arranged by season and fresh, local ingredients.
Photo Credit: John Autry
Leef: I noticed the word “thoughtful” in the cookbook’s title. Can you tell me more about that? What do you mean by “thoughtful cooking?”
Dissen: It’s like peeling the layers of an onion back. There’s this idea of cooking with intention, right? Planning a meal out? We have a French term called “mise en place,” and it literally means everything in its place. But it’s also the prep you make, the things you cut and prepare as you want to cook in the kitchen.
What’s also thoughtful [is] thinking about who you’re getting your food from. How are they growing the food? Are you growing the food? What are you doing to take care of the earth? Are you doing things that help the community around you? And then, even bigger picture … I believe in sustainability very deeply, but I’m not out hitting people over the head with it. I believe we should implement those ideals into our day-to-day lives. Because if we want our next generation, and the generation after that, to have nice things like we have, we have to take care of them. And this idea that we can all do little things by eating and cooking thoughtfully. Go to the farmers market. Talk to the growers growing delicious and nutritious food and try it. Even if you’re scared of an ingredient, you know what? Be brave. Go out and try something new.
Leef: What would you say are the tastes of Appalachia? How would you describe what Appalachian cuisine tastes like?
Dissen: I was really fortunate — few years back, I got asked to do a TV show with this very famous chef named Gordon Ramsay. And he asked me to be an ambassador for his TV show, to show him through central Appalachia and the Smoky Mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains. I took him out, and we went foraging, and we went fly fishing and cooked a lot of Indigenous ingredients and Cherokee dishes. After the show, we sat down and talked. He told me he had traveled the world ten times over. He said Appalachia reminded him of places like Tuscany, Italy, that are world-renowned for their cuisine, the heirloom ingredients, the heritage cooking techniques and the sense of place. He said he had never been to a place like this. He couldn’t believe the world wasn’t just putting us all up on a pedestal.
Leef: You serve Appalachian-influenced cuisine at your restaurant in Asheville, The Market Place. I’m sure people come to that restaurant because they are seeking a taste of home, and then you have people who’ve maybe never tasted some of these dishes or flavors. What reactions do you get from people inside Appalachia and people passing through from outside Appalachia?
Dissen: You know, I always joke the Appalachian “gateway drug,” or gateway ingredient, is ramps. People say, what’s a ramp? I say it’s like a wild onion, a wild garlic that grows in the forest. It’s not cultivated, and it only grows for a month of the year. We try to get it, pickle it, preserve it, and keep it to have that flavor throughout the year. People taste it, and they say this is a really delicious flavor, especially if you’re a garlic fan. Ramps are like garlic on steroids.
So there are flavors of wild food, foraged food and wild mushrooms. There are the flavors of campfire cooking and rich, hearty dishes that stick to your soul. Those are things that people talk a lot about.
Southern food [is] quintessential American cuisine. But Appalachia is the backbone of the South. And our cuisine really is wrought in our history and heritage. Not just of modern America, but also historically, of Native American cuisine, that hunter-gatherer background, and food of necessity.
Leef: I’m thinking about Thanksgiving. Obviously, in Asheville, that’s going to look different for a lot of people. I’m also wondering what some of the Thanksgiving dishes you have around your table are.
Dissen: I worked with Slow Food USA for one of my favorite ingredients. They have the Ark of Taste, where they preserve different heirloom ingredients. One of them is really near and dear to me: the candy roaster squash — this type of hearty squash pumpkin that was cultivated originally by the Cherokee of central Appalachia. It’s this long, banana-looking squash shape. And the flavor is really delicious to me. So, we love to make a candy roaster squash soup out of it. Roast it off slowly, nice and caramelized, and cook it slow and low into really delicious pureed soup.
I also love stuffing. Many people don’t like it, but I love good, crispy, chewy stuffing. And I love mushrooms. This time of year, a wild mushroom called a maitake, or a hen of the wood mushroom is in season. We love to roast it and fold it into our stuffing. To me, it adds a depth of flavor.
I also love soup beans and cornbread, which are quintessential Appalachian cuisine. But over Thanksgiving, just setting a meal together, and regardless of your background or culture, I think that idea of setting the Appalachian table and sitting with your family and sitting with your friends and sharing a meal is really quintessential to who we are as a culture and community.
The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
In the spring, morel hunters in Virginia take to the woods in search of mushrooms that look like little Christmas trees. Some people freeze them for later. Folkways Reporter Wendy Welch asked foragers and chefs for lessons on harvesting and preparing this beloved fungi.
This story originally aired in the Nov. 17, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.
Morels grow in April and sometimes into May throughout most of Appalachia. These were harvested by Adam Boring.
Photo Credit: Adam Boring
Morel mushrooms are popular in Appalachia, where people here have been eating them for generations. Morels are not always easy to find, though.
“Yeah, they’re definitely one of the more difficult mushrooms, I think, to find,” says Virginia Master Naturalist Adam Boring.
Adam Boring is a Virginia Master Naturalist specializing in mushrooms. He visited Wytheville in April 2024 to hunt mushrooms in Jefferson National Forest at the edge of Virginia and North Carolina.
Photo Credit: Wendy Welch/West Virginia Public BroadcastingBoring’s mushroom lab is at his grandmother’s house in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. He has studied mushrooms for six years.
Photo Credit: Wendy Welch/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Boring grew up in the town of Appalachia in southwest Virginia. He became a recognized expert by learning from experienced hunters. After his first mushroom hike in 2018, he began reading all the information he could find about fungi in central Appalachia.
“I joined the Virginia Master Naturalists, and at the end of my training class, there was nobody who taught a mycology course,” Boring says. “And one of the other Master Naturalists, he said, ‘Hey, Adam, you seem to like mushrooms, you should teach a class for us.’ I just kind of dove headfirst and didn’t look back.”
To find the elusive morels, Boring recommends looking for a poplar or sycamore tree, and then nudging leaves with one’s toes until something that looks like a tiny tree or a beehive appears. Morels tend to be small, so it’s easy to miss them in the leaf litter, Boring says.
Morels are easy to miss in leaf litter. They can be very small.
Photo Credit: Adam Boring
“Sycamore leaves are very big and bulky and create a deep layer of leaves, and they can hide underneath those leaves. You can walk over them and never even know that you’ve found them until you accidentally kick over the leaves and expose them.”
If one is lucky enough to see a mushroom emerge from the leaf litter, check carefully to see if the mushroom is more rounded than pointy, resembling an ear or a brain. Those are likely false morels.
It’s common for first-timers to head home empty-handed, says Elissa Powers.
Elissa Powers is a native of Pound, Virginia. She learned to hunt morels as a child with her family.
Photo Credit: Elissa Powers
Powers was raised in Pound, Virginia, in a coal community called Bold Camp. Her father is a renowned morel hunter. He taught his three daughters all the tricks of the craft.
“We would just pack up on a Saturday morning if the weather conditions had been right for it in the month of April,” she says. “And we would just pack up the whole family and go, and I remember being taught that when you see the first one, you’ll know where to find the rest. And it’s hard to explain. But it’s very true,” she says.
The Mullins-Powers cousins prepare to hunt morels circa 1979. Elissa Powers is on the shoulders of her cousin Michael Mullins.
Photo Credit: Walter Powers
Powers found her first morel at about age eight and has been finding them ever since, in season, and usually in company with other family members. She has fond memories of these annual hunts while growing up.
“It was a treat. It was special. It was seasonal. I’m 47 years old. We’ve done this all our lives. My entire family does it. Both sides of the family.”
Powers’ father taught her to bring home the morels, but it was her mother who taught her how to fry them up in a pan. In her home kitchen, Powers demonstrates how to run a sink full of water, add salt, and submerge the mushrooms. Leave them to soak for at least an hour, she says.
“I have never had them cleaned any other way besides the saltwater soak, and I’m probably not very interested in any other way, either, after I’ve seen the water – the things that come out of them.”
Morels can hide many bugs, including tiny snails. A salt soak is essential. Photo Credit: Adam Boring
Those “things” include spiders, mites and centipedes, so don’t skimp on the soak. Next, slice the morels in half. This is both a final safety measure and what gives them their nickname of “dry land fish.” Sliced lengthwise, a true morel should resemble a gutted fish. Its stem will be hollow.
“If it’s not hollow, you do not have a real morel,” Powers says. “Cut them in half lengthwise, and that way you can get anything that has crawled up in there out. You do not want to be visiting a whole morel that is hosting a family of centipedes. You will never forget that, and you’ll never forget to split them open and clean them again.”
A morel sliced lengthwise will resemble a gutted fish. Note its characteristic hollow stem, a final safety check on whether you have a true morel, and the reason for its nickname of “dry land fish.” Also note that unclean morels can house ants as well as snails.
Photo Credit: Adam Boring
The Powers family has been known to consume more than 30 dry land fish in one sitting, so leftover morel storage was rarely an issue. But morels do freeze well if you cook them first, Powers says.
“You can keep them, but since they’re a mushroom you can’t just pop them into the freezer. Because once the little ice crystals form they’re gonna destroy the cells and you’re gonna be pulling mush out of the freezer later. But if you prepare them, clean them and cook them oily as you are going to consume them, and then put them in the freezer, they will be good.”
Indefinitely, Powers adds. Her family often pulls them out for Thanksgiving celebrations six months after freezing – if they can keep them that long without digging into them.
“I am not sure how many morels I’ve eaten in my lifetime. But I’m sure it’s more than most people have ever seen. I would say now, in my adult years, where my dad – my morel concierge – brings them to me, I’ve probably got a couple of dozen a year at most,” Powers says.
Over in Abingdon, Virginia, Ben Carroll would like to see more people eating morels. He is the owner and executive chef at Rain Restaurant, open only for evening meals and renowned for upscale dining.
Carroll triages how he cooks morels according to size.
Rain Restaurant offers evening-only fine dining in Abingdon, Virginia. Chef Ben Carroll uses traditional Appalachian ingredients and cooking methods in some of his famous creations.
Photo Credit: Ben Carroll
“If they’re little bitty guys that are as big as the tip of your thumb, then you just keep them whole. And then you would just batter and fry them like you would any kind of battered mushroom,” Caroll says.
The big ones, he uses to explore culinary creativity.
“You can stuff them. We’ve made mousse before – used a little piping bag to fill them with some type of filling, and then you bread them and fry them. They’re good that way, either like a cheese filling or a pâté kind of filling.”
He does not suggest serving morels raw, though. Caroll considers it a safety issue – and a matter of taste: morels are better cooked.
Just remember, safety first: go with an experienced morel hunter, and never eat any mushroom not properly identified and prepared.
The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
Just about every culture has some version of the dumpling. China has the wonton. They make ravioli in Italy. Different forms of dumplings have made their way into Appalachia and that includes pierogies from eastern Europe, which arrived more than a century ago. Folkways Reporter Will Warren went to Wheeling, West Virginia for a story about neighborhood pierogi makers.
This story originally aired in the July 21, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.
On a Tuesday morning in the kitchen of Our Lady of Perpetual Help — a Ukrainian Catholic Church in Wheeling, West Virginia — there’s a group making pierogies the way churchgoers have for more than 100 years.
“Vareniki. It means to boil,” says Mary Ann Mysliwiec, one of the crew. “It’s the Ukrainian word for pierogi.”
Mary Ann Mysliwiec displays a small plate of pierogies made at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Photo Credit: Will Warren/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Pierogies are stuffed pockets of dough that are boiled and then drenched in butter. They have roots in Poland, but variations can be found throughout Eastern Europe, including Ukraine.
Over the years, pierogies have evolved, with some modern twists.
“Pierogies have become Americanized,” Mysliwiec says. “People have now started putting jalapeño potatoes in it. Some people have started to do dessert ones.”
At Our Lady of Perpetual Help, however, immigrant heritage and tradition remain the cornerstone of pierogi making.
“They’re always the same way; they haven’t changed,” says Olga Skvarka, who is 98. “We make three kinds each week — potato and cheese, and then potato, cheese and onion, and then we have a third one, sauerkraut.”
Olga Skvarka, 98, comes in early to put the pots and pans out for the group, and to start the water for boiling.
Photo Credit: Will Warren/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Like Mysliwiec, Skvarka is part of the dedicated team that comes together weekly to make over 1,000 pierogies through an assembly line process.
“We have a nice working group,” says Skvarka. “I come down earlier and I put the pots and pans and the water on, and then I set the table for the pinchers when they come in. We all have different jobs we do; it’s like a process.”
While the fundamental process remains unchanged, the pierogi makers at the church have introduced some innovations. John Paluch, who is responsible for rolling and cutting the dough, says his grandmother and the other women who made pierogies had marble rolling pins. And they cut out the dough using water glasses. Now, he uses a dough-rolling machine as well as a specialized dough-cutting tool acquired from a monastery in Canada.
The pierogi makers acquired a specialized dough-cutting tool from a monastery in Canada to help speed the process.
Photo Credit: Will Warren/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Once the dough has been cut into circles, a team of women with nimble fingers fills them and pinches them closed. Paluch says even with the help of the machines, “I still have to work very hard to keep up with the ladies and their pinching.”
John Paluch uses a machine to roll out the dough to pass on to the pinchers. But he says he still struggles to keep up.
Photo Credit: Will Warren/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The Historical Influence Of Immigrant Communities In Wheeling
The tradition of pierogi making in Wheeling traces back to the late 1800s, when immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe settled in the region to work in the mines and mills.
“Because Wheeling’s immigrant communities were so intertwined with each other, they couldn’t really be entirely separate. Everybody, in a way, kind of partook in that culture to one extent or another,” says William Gorby, author of the book Wheeling’s Polonia: Reconstructing Polish Community in a West Virginia Steel Town.
Part of that intermingling included sharing traditions like pierogi making. Those traditions continue to live on at cultural festivals throughout the region, such as Wheeling’s annual Polish Heritage Day. Gorby says it’s a way for the descendents of those immigrants to celebrate their roots.
“It’s like the younger generation grows up distinctly Americanized and maybe doesn’t see themselves as attached to that sort of culture,” he says. “So we see a lot of these festivals come back in like the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s when the third generation was like ‘I really would like to know more about … my grandparents who literally came from Poland or Italy.’”
An hour northeast of Wheeling, pierogies even make an appearance at the Pittsburgh Pirates’ home games, with a pierogi mascot race between innings.
A tray of pierogi filling alongside a tray of perfectly pinched pierogies.
Photo Credit: Will Warren/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
From Boiling To Butter Bathing: The Final Touches, With Love
After the pierogies are pinched closed, they’re boiled and bathed in melted butter. Then they are drained and dried under fans before being packaged for sale on Thursdays.
George James is hard at work boiling the pierogies, soaking them in melted butter and then draining them before passing them on to be dried.
Photo Credit: Will Warren/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
When I was young, I was raised on another kind of pocket of dough — chicken and dumplings. I didn’t have my first pierogi until I was in my 20s, from a store-bought box of frozen Ms. T’s. After sampling the pierogies made by the team at the church, however, I quickly discovered store-bought could never compare.
When I asked Mary Ann Mysliwiec what makes the homemade pierogies at Our Lady so special, she says, “We always say you cook with love.”
The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
