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W.Va. Folklife Apprenticeship Pair Passing On Family Soul Food Traditions

From creamy macaroni and cheese to fried chicken feet, soul food has brought happiness to families and individuals throughout the world. Soul food is typically associated with states in the deep South, but the cooking style is traditional in the Appalachian region, too.

This story originally aired in the Nov. 12, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

It’s a warm spring afternoon at Manna House Ministries, a Second Baptist Church in Beckley, West Virginia. Xavier Oglesby is singing his favorite hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul,” as he prepares a macaroni salad in the church’s kitchen. Today, Oglesby is cooking alone, but normally this kitchen would be bustling with life.

“It kind of reminds you of when you watch a bee’s nest and how the bees are. They’re buzzing around and everybody is just so busy. That’s just kind of what it looks like, but it’s an organized chaos,” Oglesby said. “The ladies at the church growing up, you know the old ladies, they’d be cooking. And all the ladies, they would bring their best recipes. And every one of them is good at something — at least one thing — and they pride themselves at that.”

It might be macaroni salad, or a pan of biscuits, or chitlins. Soul food is a cooking style that is intrinsic to Black culture both in the South and Appalachia. Oglesby said more so than the food itself, it’s the way a meal comes together that makes soul food, soul food.

“When you think of soul food, that’s the first thing you think of is Black folks. Because we were able to take nothing and make something out of it for a meal, and that’s the way it is even today,” Oglesby said.

Oglesby has been cooking since he was a teenager. He learned from four generations of his family. But learning how to cook in the Oglesby household wasn’t always easy. It had its moments of strict instruction from his great grandmother, Grandma Virginia.

“She cooked for the superintendents of the coal companies. And as you know, back then they were domestics, and that’s what she did. She was known for that. I mean this lady, she could cook — I mean, almost in her sleep. It was amazing to me just to see her cook and how she would sing,” Oglesby said. “And everything had to be done perfectly.”

Grandma Virginia expected perfection from her great-grandson, too.

“She would have a wooden spoon in her hand, and she’d watch me prepare this dish, and I would have to do it exactly how she would do it,” Oglesby said. “If I didn’t do it, if I missed the step or whatever, she’d hit the back of my hand with the wooden spoon.”

In his family and at church, women were central to the cooking traditions Oglesby grew up with. So as a boy who was interested in cooking, he felt some judgment from the men in his family. Older men in the family weren’t accepting of Oglesby wanting to make a career out of cooking, due to his gender.

“In this family, you have to kind of take your place,” Oglesby said. “And that’s what I did. And then eventually it was easier for the guys of the family — for the older men — to accept and like that. When you look around today, you know, guys make a living doing anything,” Oglesby said.

Xavier Oglesby cuts onions for a macaroni salad he is cooking inside Manna House Ministries’ kitchen. A pot of boiling water is behind him, cooking the pasta for the dish.

*Credit: Vanessa Peña/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Now, Oglesby is teaching his niece, Brooklynn Oglesby, how to cook soul food and family recipes. He’s doing this through the West Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program, which is directed by the West Virginia State Folklorist Jennie Williams.

“This program is hosted every other year. But for a full year, artists can be a part of this program to pass on their traditional knowledge and art forms and skills to an apprentice of their choosing,” Williams said.

Folklife apprenticeship pairs are carrying on community-based traditional art forms and cultural practices — from fiddle instrument repair to mushroom foraging — all with the goal of passing on stories, skill sets and traditional knowledge.

Full disclosure, I worked with Williams as an AmeriCorps member this year. This is an excerpt from an interview Williams did with Oglesby and Brooklynn, where Brooklynn talks about learning from her uncle.

“My main goal has been to learn how to cook, and he’s taught me a lot,” Brooklynn said. “I’ve had to cook on my own. I’ve had to make meals and stuff, and I’ve struggled since I’ve moved out with my own family. It’s been a major struggle because half the time I’ll spend two hours cooking just for it to be so nasty.”

Each apprenticeship pair considers the future of their tradition, and who they want to pass their knowledge onto.

“I’m hoping I can raise two sons that know how to cook,” Brooklynn said. “I’m hoping I can keep that going and teach my kids, and hopefully they’ll be better cooks than me one day.”

For the past year, Oglesby and Brooklynn have been spending time learning together. Williams said Oglesby and Brooklynn are exactly the kind of pairing the apprenticeship program aims to support.

“I was really excited to receive their application. Oglesby has worked with us in our first round of the apprenticeship program,” Williams said. “So to have him back again in the program is really exciting. And for him to bring on his niece to learn their family cooking traditions, that’s especially something that we want to support.”

A complete bowl of macaroni salad sits on a table. It’s surrounded by onion peels, a container of paprika, a jar of pickles and a jar of Hellman’s Mayonnaise. This recipe has been passed onto Xavier Oglesby by his mother.

*Credit: Vanessa Peña/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

As part of their work together, the Oglesby’s have prepared food for community gatherings and they’ve hosted events. One of those events was a card party, which is an informal community game night.

“On the coal camp, we used to have card parties and people would go to each other’s houses,” Oglesby said. “On the nights that they would have the card parties, the ladies would bring covered dishes and they would have all kinds of stuff. They would bring pig feet, and somebody may bring some chitlins.”

These card parties have been hosted by Oglesby and Brooklynn at the Women’s Club in Beckley, West Virginia. They have featured live music, tables with cards, and of course, good old-fashioned soul food.

——

This story was produced with help from the West Virginia Folklife Program. The full interview with Xavier and Brooklynn Oglesby by Jennie Williams is archived at the West Virginia Folklife Collection at West Virginia University Libraries.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.

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.

Appalachian Mushroom Experts Welcome Sprouting Newbies

On an overcast but hot morning, a mushroom hunt began with a car ride to a secret spot near the home of West Virginia master naturalists Shawn Means and Amy McLaughlin. The pair run a boutique vacation rental called Lafayette Flats in Fayetteville, next to the New River Gorge Natural Park and Preserve.

This story originally aired in the Nov. 12, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

On an overcast but hot morning, a mushroom hunt began with a car ride to a secret spot near the home of West Virginia master naturalists Shawn Means and Amy McLaughlin.

The pair run a boutique vacation rental called Lafayette Flats in Fayetteville, next to the New River Gorge Natural Park and Preserve.

They lead eco tours for people who stay in their flats, pointing out unique flora, fauna and fungi in the area.

Shawn Means and Amy McLaughlin are the West Virginia Master Naturalists who guided the mushroom hunt.

*Credit: Shawn Means*

Fungi are especially popular on the tours. “Mushrooms have been so hot lately,” McLaughlin said during the drive.

Means and McLaughlin were quick to name reasons why mushrooms have gained such popularity. They cited three: the pandemic got people interested in sourcing local foods; being outside during the pandemic was one of your few recreation options; and HBO Max created a hit series about a type of mushroom that takes over their host, creating a ‘shroom zombie.

Cordyceps, the fungi fictionalized as creating human zombies, really do exist. But they do not eat human brains, as the TV series shows them doing.

“There are mushrooms that are parasitic and they do have the same name, the genus as the ones in that show,” Means said. “But at this time, we do not believe that they will inhabit human bodies. But they do take over bugs.”

McLaughlin explained how cordyceps take over bugs.

“They get inside of the bugs into their nervous system. And they do take over them,” Mclaughlin said. “When the fungus is ready to produce the fruiting body, it comes up and kills the bug and comes up out of the bug.”

Teasing aside, the couple are eager to introduce this reporter to the joy of mushrooms. Two main paths are open to those interested in adding edible (and non-parasitic) mushrooms to their diet: farming or foraging. Misidentifying a fungus to use as food or medicine can be lethal, so foragers tend to hunt in packs until they’re experts. Experienced hunters like McLaughlin and Means are in hot demand.

Emerging from the car to search for mushrooms, Means quoted a proverb known to every mushroom enthusiast in America: “There are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters. But there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.”

In other words, McLaughlin reiterated, it is a good idea to be super-careful when hunting fungi.

The couple led the way into a hilly forest. Birdsong filled the air. Dry leaves crackled underfoot — which was a bad sign, Means pointed out. Mushrooms proliferate after rainfall.

A mushroom, known officially as a fruiting body, is the smallest part of a larger living organism that needs a lot of water and can cover miles — all out of sight to the human eye.

“You’re in the woods and you see the trees and you see the mushrooms. And then if you just stop and think the vast majority of the fungus is underneath us, you know, and just think about that for a minute,” McLaughlin said. “Like the dark, the dark soil, the earth underneath us and that huge organism that’s under there that’s pushing all the fruiting bodies up. I think that’s fascinating to think about.”

There are also mushrooms that grow from wood rather than soil, but this hunt focused on chanterelles, which do grow in the ground. Unfortunately, the hunt did not go well. The forest floor proved dry and barren.

With a leap to a nearby ridge, Means attempted to find the fungi on a slope that might have encouraged water runoff, something the mushrooms would have liked. “I want to jump up here and see if I can see any,” Means said.

This also proved fruitless. “I don’t see any mushrooms at all,” Means called back before reappearing at the edge of the ledge, empty-handed.

Chanterelles would have been easy to spot, had any been around. Popular for teaching new foragers because of their bright yellow color and distinctive fluted edges that make them look like a tiny trumpet, they would be hard to mix up with any other mushroom — but not impossible.

McLaughlin described the most likely case of mistaken identity.

“There’s one called a, we affectionately call it a ‘jack-o’-lantern mushroom,’” McLauglin said. “Once you learn the difference, it doesn’t look anything like a chanterelle, it has very different characteristics. But it’s kind of the same color. So if you were a newbie, and you just were, you know, going through the woods and saw that color, it’s possible you could get excited. And those are poisonous. They’re not going to kill you, but they’re going to make you sick.”

The hunting party for chanterelles did prove successful after a few minutes, but it was still a disappointment.

Means pointed to an object on the forest floor and said in a sad tone, “One chanterelle, and it’s old.”

A single, ancient chanterelle on the forest floor proved to be the only mushroom found the day of the hunt.

*Credit: Wendy Welch/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

After another fruitless half-hour, Means and McLaughlin drove back to their home, promising to cook up some mushrooms they foraged the day before in a “just in case” plan B.

In their well-appointed kitchen decorated with mushroom art, Means hauled a double handful of chanterelles from the fridge.

Shawn Means and Amy McLaughlin have a mushroom-themed kitchen.

*Credit: Shawn Means*

Means cooked down the little fluted trumpets in butter until they were lightly crispy, mixed in a small amount of honey, and served this over vanilla ice cream.

From skeptic to enthusiast, this reporter declared, “Mmm, that’s good.”

Chanterelle ice cream sundaes proved very tasty indeed, a combination of crunch, sweetness, and two smooth textures, one cold, one warm.

Mushroom hunting with experts such as Means and McLaughlin might also be described as a rare treat.

Shawn Means cooks up chanterelles. He fried them on high heat to get them crispy quickly, before removing them from the heat and adding a drizzle of honey.

*Credit: Wendy Welch/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

However, if learning to identify the roughly 2,500 species that grow in central Appalachia feels daunting, those interested in fungi could try mushroom farming instead. It is safer, simpler and less subject to the vagaries of rainfall.

To home-grow mushrooms, you need a log or a cardboard box, and some spawn.

Ben Harder runs Den Hill Farms and Fungi in Christiansburg, Virginia. The farm offers workshops on cultivating fresh mushrooms, and business is booming. One of his most popular workshops teaches people to inoculate logs with spawn, also known as “mycelium.”

“We are mushroom farmers for eight years,” Harder said. They started with inoculating logs before moving into some specialized media like straw mixed with compost.

Inoculating a log means drilling a hole and pushing the mycelium into the wood. There it will feed and be fed in a symbiotic relationship, taking in carbohydrates from the log, then pushing out B vitamins and minerals like potassium through the fruiting body.

Harder vends at the Blacksburg farmers market, and it was there that he shared his personal entry story into mushroom farming.

“An Appalachian Trail thru hiker that happened to live in Blacksburg was coming through, and they were trying to sell these shiitake logs that they had inoculated,” Harder said. “Mushrooms were taking this waste product, a log, that is worth nothing but firewood, and making a high value retail product out of it. And that really blew my mind. You know, they’re making something out of nothing. And so it’s very exciting. And so he sold me the logs. That year, I killed ‘em because I left them inside of the barn and they dried out. But the next year, I started inoculating logs.”

That second round of inoculated logs went better, and Den Hill never looked back. In just a couple of years, they went from vending 100 percent fruits and vegetables to 40 percent produce and 60 percent fungi. Their bestseller home-growing method is not logs, though; it is a countertop kit.

“Doing the tabletop farm or the mushroom fruiting block on your counter, it’s really quite an experience,” Harder said. “Because it looks so beautiful. It’s like a living bouquet.”

Countertop box kits were everywhere during the pandemic, and they have stuck around. Harder sells bags of spawn to put in your own box. Walmart sells cardboard blocks full of specific spawn.

Stash the open box in a dark corner of your kitchen counter, keep it wet but not soaking, and in a couple of weeks, you have mushrooms.

An oyster mushroom kit in reporter Wendy Welch’s kitchen. Oysters bloomed three times before the box gave out.

*Credit: Wendy Welch/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

“You can just kind of see it come and then when it hits prime, you get to just pluck off the mushrooms and eat them. And they even last a while in the fridge. You can keep them for a week or two,” Harder said. “So it’s a lot of fun and like a learning experience to see how mushrooms work.”

It is also educational. Den Hill sells the bulk of their fungal products to families with young kids, which pleases Harder immensely.

“It’s really been amazing, seeing the youth — especially like five to 12-year-olds — that are really showing interest in coming out of the woodwork,” Harder said.

Harder gets excited about the science projects he has helped kids with. Mushrooms tend to capture young imaginations for many reasons, not least because they capture environmental toxins.

“Oyster mushrooms can live on an oil spill and clean it and produce safe mushrooms to eat. It’s really incredible,” Harder said. “I have kids that show up and they want to do their fifth grade science project on building blocks or making insulation out of mycelium. And they need mycelium. And we’ve had other five year olds know all these different strains and want to grow them.”

Harder also delighted in vegans and experimental chefs growing tabletop farms for the joy of eating those fresh fruiting bodies, sometimes as an alternative to meat. Two of the most popular countertop mushrooms are lion’s mane, which tastes like lobster, and oyster, which tastes like mushrooms.

When it comes to a kitchen kit, the world is your oyster, Harder said.

“We have 24 different types of mushrooms in our culture library that we’re actively growing.”

The farming and foraging worlds are not mutually exclusive; most mycelium appreciation communities tend to be friendly with each other regardless of methodology. Harder thought this was in part because mushrooms are so hyper-local.

“I think mushrooms create community by having to be a decentralized system, where cultures and strains and mushroom fruiting bodies can be sold and traded locally, because of their lack of ship-ability, and kind of regional availability,” Harder said.

Kits will bring mushrooms safely and easily into your kitchen. For the thrill of a woodland hunt, hunt down a mushroom club. These are prolific in Appalachia.

Whether they are foraged or farmed, fungi can be fantastic fun.

——

Fish Fries Serve As Mutual Aid For Charleston, W.Va.’s Black Community

Drive through Charleston, West Virginia any day of the week, and you’re bound to come across a sign advertising a local fish fry. Within Charleston’s Black community, fish fries have been a time-honored tradition for generations. Our Folkways Fellow Leeshia Lee grew up in Charleston. She says that it was common to see friends and neighbors hosting fish fries — they’d sell fish dinners as a way to raise money for different needs. In this special report, Lee shares her experiences with fish fries, and visits with one of Charleston’s best fish fryers.

This story originally aired in the Oct. 22, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Our Folkways Fellow Leeshia Lee grew up in Charleston. She says that it was common to see friends and neighbors hosting fish fries — they’d sell fish dinners as a way to raise money for different needs.

In this special report, Lee shares her experiences with fish fries, and visits with one of Charleston’s best fish fryers.

History Of Fish Fries

Some people would have fish fries for rent parties — they would have a fish fry if they were short on their rent. Or if there was a trip that somebody needed to go on and they didn’t have all the funds, they would whip up some fish and sell it outside. Growing up, it was nothing to go to someone’s house to purchase food for whatever reason they needed it for.

In our community, I think historically the reason why fish fries are the thing is because it comes from the slave era. And it was what they were allowed to do on Sundays. They were allowed to go fishing. And because it was free — they didn’t have to purchase it — they would catch fish.

That’s how enslaved communities would fraternize with each other, was through cooking and preparing fish, and eating it later on in the day. So I think that the tradition of having the fish fry has been embedded in our community. It is something that we were taught to do, and we do it so well that we use it as a financial means when we don’t have resources to do anything else.

What Makes A Good Fish Fry

I think the most important part of a fish fry is the meaning or the purpose for having the fish fry. Don’t get me wrong, people care about the food, the taste of it. But if it’s for a good cause, people will come out and support your fish fry.

People use different fish for their fish fries. And a lot of times people use whiting. You usually get the fish, you let it thaw out. And you season it. The main part is how you season your fish. We use cornmeal, and then we use seasoning salt. And you have to get the grease just right. It has to be sizzling and popping. And then you dip the fish and you fry it. And you can’t make it too hard. Some people serve it on croissant bread, and some people serve it on regular white bread. You add hot sauce, tartar sauce, and then it’s good to go.

Texas Pete is the community favorite hot sauce. But sometimes you go to a fish fry and you get the off-brand hot sauce. So I think whatever is there, you just make it work. But I’ve seen some people reach in their purse and pull out some hot sauce. I think that was in one of Beyonce’s songs, where she says she has some hot sauce in her bag.

The sides are very important at a fish fry. Some people like coleslaw, but usually you get the same soul food sides that you would have at a Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner: macaroni and cheese, and greens. And then sometimes people have fish fries with french fries.

Fish Fries At Charleston’s First Baptist Church

Andre Nazario

*Credit: Leeshia Lee/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Andre Nazario is known as one of Charleston’s best fish fryers. He hosts a weekly fish fry at the First Baptist Church in downtown Charleston. Nazario said their recipe at the church is top secret.

“I can’t really divulge those secrets because then I’d have to take you hostage,” Nazario said. “But yes, there is a certain way that we prepare our fish. There’s a certain way that we season our fish. There’s a certain way that we fry our fish. There’s a certain temperature that we fry it at. And there’s a certain crisp that we want, a certain texture that we want to our fish.”

The fish fries are held at First Baptist Church in the gymnasium. When you walk in, you might see people you know who are waiting for their food.

“It’s like mini family reunions,” Nazario said. “So we’re bringing people together. You get to talk about it, you strike up some conversation. You hadn’t seen somebody in a while, you hadn’t talked to them, but then they came out to the fish fry. So it’s a way of touching base and staying connected with our community.”

Nazario is the co-founder of Creating the Advantage, known as CTA. CTA is a nonprofit that works with under-resourced youth around Charleston. They support young people to excel in sports and in school. The money from these fish fries helps fund CTA’s activities.

“We set a price for our fish fry, but most of the time people give a little bit more,” Nazario said. “Because when you offer food, that entices them or encourages them to give a little bit more.”

One of the main components of CTA is their basketball program. They train participants in the physical aspect of the sport. And they teach them to cope with the mental challenges of the game. The fish fries play a key role in supporting this program.

A fryer full of fish.

*Credit: Leeshia Lee/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

“With the fish fries that we do, the proceeds go directly to the kids,” Nazario said. “It helps fund training. It helps fund trips, it helps pay for uniforms, it helps pay for hotels for the kids, it helps feed our kids. It’s an assortment of things that we do with the funding from fish fries. And again, the best way to someone’s heart sometimes is through their stomach.”

Fish fries are very important to the Black community in Charleston because they allow us to become our own resource. Fish fries are a source of mutual aid when the funds are limited. It allows the community to come together to show that what you’re doing is important to them.

——

‘Where We Learned About Pepperoni Rolls’ — Uncovering The Story Of the Kanawha County Schools’ Pepperoni Roll

It starts — as all pepperoni rolls do — with the dough. But not just any dough. That’s one of the secrets of Kanawha schools’ pepperoni rolls. They are made using the same recipe as the delicious, soft and sweet hot rolls that accompany every school Thanksgiving dinner and Salisbury steak.

This story originally aired in the Aug. 13, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

It’s 7:30 a.m. in the kitchen at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston, West Virginia. Breakfast just wrapped up, but lunch is already heavy on everyone’s minds. There’s a lot of cooking to do between then and now.

Food Services Coordinator Lori Lanier shows me how to make Kanawha County Schools’ famous pepperoni rolls.

“I don’t care how many times you make them, sometimes you may have a pinch more flour or a pinch less flour. You just have to watch the consistency, because it’s all on how the flour is sifted,” Lanier explains over the rumble of a jumbo-sized stand mixer.

It will take several batches of dough to make enough pepperoni rolls for the school. Each batch then has to raise for half an hour before the process can continue.

After the dough has risen, cooks still have to individually stuff and shape the rolls, filling giant sheet pans that go into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes. Once the tops are golden brown, the rolls come out of the oven and are brushed with a coating of melted butter.

Lori Lanier, Kanawha County Schools food services coordinator, mixes up a batch of pepperoni roll dough at Horace Mann Middle School. Lanier previously worked at the school as a cook.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Cooks will tell you — this is one of the most time consuming lunches to prepare. A lot of schools shift pepperoni roll day to the end of the week so they can work on the rolls a few days in advance. Horace Mann made half of their rolls the day before I visited, storing them in the walk-in cooler until it was time to pop them in the oven.

But there is a good reason to go to all this trouble. These pepperoni rolls are beloved by generations of school kids.

“On pepperoni roll days, the teachers would let you out five or ten minutes early so you could get to the cafeteria, because there was always such a long line,” said Whitney Humphrey, a friend and former co-worker who graduated from Riverside High School in 2007. “Because even kids who typically didn’t eat school lunch would eat lunch on pepperoni roll day.”

It was a similar story at Capital High School, where Brittany Carowick graduated in 2006.

“We’d always try to talk our teachers into letting us, in class, at the door so we could run all the way across the courtyard and be first in line for pepperoni rolls. Because they’re so good,” she said.

And Carowick really shouldn’t have been eating the pepperoni rolls.

“I’m actually allergic to pepperoni. But I still loved the pepperoni rolls. So I would unroll them, take the line of pepperoni out, hand it to all my friends, roll it back up and eat it,” she said.

Tom Bragg is also a former coworker of mine. He graduated from Nitro High School, where his love of pepperoni rolls turned him into something of a scam artist.

“Twenty years ago, you were assigned a lunch number. It wasn’t like a scan card or a barcode,” he said. “They told you, ‘Here’s your three-digit or four-digit number — don’t forget it.’”

At some point, Bragg realized these numbers had been assigned alphabetically and in numerical order. So his best friend, who just happened to share the same last name, had a lunch number just one digit away from his own.

“My best friend always brought his lunch or would skip school and go get lunch somewhere else,” Bragg said. “So I was like, man, he’s not taking advantage of pepperoni roll day. And his number is one before mine. So I’m just going to go back through line and get a second pepperoni roll.”

The plan went off without a hitch — until his friend’s mom received a lunch bill.

“We were at his house and the lunch bill came. His mom was like, ‘I thought you didn’t eat lunch at school,’” Bragg said. “And I started giggling. She was like, ‘Tommy you owe me $10 for the pepperoni rolls you ate last month.’”

This probably comes as no surprise. At this point, pepperoni rolls are an iconic West Virginia food: invented in the north-central part of the state by Italian immigrants who wanted a portable lunch to take into the coal mines. The story is as well-known as John Henry or Mothman.

But if you’re a West Virginian who didn’t grow up within an hour’s drive from Clarksburg, cast your mind back about 20 or 30 years. How prevalent were pepperoni rolls back then?

I went to school one county away from Kanawha, in Boone County. We never had pepperoni rolls on our school menu. I’ve polled folks around my age who grew up in neighboring counties — Putnam, Lincoln, Jackson, Logan, Clay, Nicholas — and none of them had pepperoni rolls at school, either.

Even my Kanawha County friends who enjoyed pepperoni rolls at school didn’t have many memories of them outside the lunchroom.

“Kanawha County Schools is where we learned about pepperoni rolls,” Bragg said. “You started seeing them pop up in gas stations after that.”

Trays of pepperoni rolls, ready for the lunch rush at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston, West Virginia.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

So here’s what I decided to figure out — when did pepperoni rolls first appear in Kanawha County Schools, and how did the dish come to appear on the menu?

“It became kind of a quest,” said Diane Miller, Kanawha County Schools’ director of Child Nutrition.

Once Miller heard about my research project, she started fishing around, too. There’s apparently no paper record of the pepperoni rolls’ first appearance. There’s no archive of school menus that we could dig into. So she had to rely on school employees’ memories.

“They believe it started between 1992 and 1994. But we in Kanawha County can get it back to ‘97, ‘98.”

She talked with the Kanawha superintendent and folks from the West Virginia Department of Education. She even found some retired school cooks and picked their brains.

That’s how she discovered a possible origin story.

”They were making their own pizza breads and they ran out, and didn’t know what else to do. So they decided — they had roll dough for the next day, so they put them together. They’d had pepperoni rolls with their families that were working in the mines,” Miller said.

I asked Miller to connect me with a cook who might know some of the history — and she directed me to Nancy Romeo.

“I have made more pepperoni rolls than you can shake a stick at,” she said.

Romeo retired in 2010 after 20 years with the county. She says pepperoni rolls were already on the menu when she arrived in 1990. She even called a former coworker to make sure.

“We were hired about the same time. Both of us agree that they were making them before we both were hired,” Romeo said.

That was as much information as she could give me. But I had one more lead.

I called in a favor at the Charleston Gazette-Mail. There was a time when the paper printed the Kanawha schools’ menu for each week. Using that, I thought maybe we could pinpoint the first reference of pepperoni rolls.

My connection checked the newspaper archive and it turns out school menus didn’t run in the paper in the 1980s and early 1990s. But I did get the name of another retired school cook — Ellen Carter.

I found Carter in the kitchen of the Rand Community Center. She told me she didn’t really have time for an interview. But she agreed to let me hang out while she made hot rolls.

“This is going to make 120, and I feed about 112 or 115 people,” she said. “The pepperoni rolls are made out of the same dough.”

Carter has worked in this same kitchen for most of the last 50 years. She went to work for Rand Elementary in 1970 and stayed until 1999. The school shut down a few years later and became a community center. When that happened, Carter came back to cook for the center’s senior nutrition program.

“I’m 89, and in October, I’ll be 90,” she said.

Ellen Carter makes hot rolls in the kitchen at the Rand Community Center. Carter has worked in this same kitchen for much of the last 50 years.

*Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

I figured if anyone would remember when the pepperoni rolls made their school lunch debut, it would be Ellen Carter.

“I think it was the early ‘80s that they started making pepperoni rolls,” she said.

Carter couldn’t give a more exact time frame. She had no idea how the rolls came to be on school menus in the first place. But she said the recipe probably was disseminated in one of the school cooks’ regular meetings.

“We used to have monthly meetings. And we’d go to a different school, we’d take a covered dish, we’d take a menu to the dish we made, and they’d make a copy of them. I have gobs of them,” Carter said.

One thing Carter does know — the way she was taught to make the rolls is not the way cooks are making them now.

Instead of shaping them individually, she’d get a big lump of dough rolled out flat.

“Then you go back and roll it with a rolling pin,” Carter said.

She would top it with cheese and pepperoni, then roll the whole thing into a log.

“And then you cut it and roll your pepperoni rolls,” Carter said. “I don’t know anybody that rolls them out like we do.”

Carter still makes a lot of pepperoni rolls. She recently got a call to make 1,000 for a local high school, which was selling them as a fundraiser. She doesn’t usually make them for her senior citizens, though. They’re not huge fans.

“They like a hot meal. Like today, we’re going to do a baked potato and a salad,” Carter said.

Carter’s senior citizens might not care much for pepperoni rolls, but I know some folks who do.

The pepperoni rolls were going fast the day I visited Horace Mann Middle, but I managed to snag a few and tuck them away in my bag. That way, once I got my friends to open up about their pepperoni roll memories, I could surprise them with a taste of the past.

“This is exactly what I remember. Look at all that pepperoni. You can see the cheese has a little bit of that pepperoni grease on it,” Whitney Humphrey said as she tore into hers. “It’s divine.”

“Oh my gosh, that’s a trip down memory lane. That is so good,” Tom Bragg said between bites. “The meat-to-cheese ratio is great. The cheese is melted but not like lava — cooked long enough that the grease from the pepperoni has soaked into the bread but hasn’t burned it or overtaken it. This is great.”

Brittany Carowick — whose skin still gets a little itchy when she eats cured meats — quickly fell into her old habits.

“I’m pulling apart the outer layer of bread, and then you hit the spiral and you can pull that apart with your fingers,” she explained as she expertly dissected her pepperoni roll — years of muscle memory coming back into play.

With the pepperoni safely removed, she took a bite of the cheesy bread that was left.

“It’s so delicious,” she said. “That is solid cheese.”

Memory is a funny thing.

The Kanawha County Schools’ pepperoni roll is beloved by generations of school kids. And between me and the folks at the Kanawha County Board of Education, we probably talked to dozens of people trying to track down its origins.

And the best we could come up with was a hazy timeline that puts us somewhere in the early to late 80s, and a plausible — but not exactly conclusive — story about a school that ran out of pizza subs one day.

This whole story unfolded within recent living memory, and this is the best we can do.

And yet, Humphrey and Bragg and Carowick have these vivid memories that all came flooding back with a single bite.

“I’m 34 years old and I’m sitting here talking to you about pepperoni rolls, because it’s had such a presence in my life,” Humphrey said. “I don’t have very fond memories of school, but I do have fond memories of school pepperoni rolls. That seems kind of silly, but it’s true.”

——

Tree Syrup Producers Experiment With Techniques And Traditions Amidst A Warming Winter

In late winter in Highland County, Virginia, maple syrup production is a visible part of the landscape. There are maple trees everywhere, adorned with metal buckets and laced with blue tubing.

This story originally aired in the June 4, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

In late winter in Highland County, Virginia, maple syrup production is a visible part of the landscape. There are maple trees everywhere, adorned with metal buckets and laced with blue tubing. There’s a Maple Sugar Road and a Sugar Hollow and a Sugar Tree Country Store. There’s wood smoke hovering over the sugar houses and tree sap oozing from the taps, slowly making its way to becoming maple syrup.

Highland County and its neighboring counties in West Virginia are some of the southernmost areas in the United States where you can make maple syrup. It’s become a deep-rooted tradition in these communities, but these days, producers are experimenting — both out of curiosity and out of necessity.

Traditions With A Twist

Pat Lowry checks for sap in buckets.

*Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Pat Lowry and his wife Valerie operate a sugar camp in Highland County called Back Creek Farms. Like many in the area, their family has been making maple syrup here for generations.

“[Pat] has maple syrup in his veins,” Valerie Lowry said. “And he would make syrup 365 days a year if he could.”

Each March, Back Creek Farms takes part in the Highland County Maple Festival, where different sugar camps demonstrate the process of making syrup. Throughout the county, people make and sell all things maple — from maple donuts to maple barbeque.

The festival has been a staple for over sixty years in Highland County and the tradition of making maple syrup here started well before that. But over the years, practices have evolved, as people like Pat and Valerie Lowry apply new ideas and techniques to syrup production.

“People kept asking me, ‘what do you have that’s new?’ Nobody had anything that was new! It was light syrup, medium syrup or dark syrup,” Pat Lowry said.

So they started experimenting. They aged syrup in whiskey barrels and infused the pure maple syrup with natural flavors like elderberry. Valerie Lowry calls their approach “traditions with a twist.”

At this year’s maple festival, Pat Lowry boiled down sap — or around here what they call “sugar water” — while Valerie handed out samples of syrup to visitors.

“Now we are going to do chili pepper and ginger,” Valerie Lowry said, passing around the sampling spoons. “And you all are going to try hickory syrup. Hickory syrup is made from the bark of a hickory tree.”

Valerie Lowry offers samples to visitors at the Highland County Maple Syrup Festival.

*Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Tapping Black Walnut Trees, A New Frontier

Gary Mongold of Petersburg, West Virginia has been going to the Highland County Maple festival since he was a kid. But this year Mongold didn’t make it to the festival. He was busy with his own operation — it’s his second year of making black walnut syrup.

Mongold showed me around his sugar grove in his side-by-side. His property was full of walnuts situated along a steep hillside that opened out to a panorama view of Petersburg, Moorefield and Mount Storm.

The process of making black walnut syrup borrows the basic principles of maple sugaring. You drill a hole, tap a tree, and out comes the sap. Plastic tubing funnels the sugar water down the hill into a collection tank. When the sap is boiled down, it transforms into a dark syrup.

“I can’t describe it,” Mongold said. “It’s awesome. I think it’s different. It might be a little sweeter.”

Mongold drizzles the syrup over a bowl of ice cream every night.

”I just dearly love it. I better watch or I’ll eat my profits up!” Mongold said.

Gary Mongold in front of his Sugar Shack in Petersburg, West Virginia

*Credit: Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Black walnut syrup is an emerging industry and Mongold’s one of just a handful of producers in the region. He’s been working with Future Generations University out of Franklin, West Virginia to conduct research on the process. They’re trying to figure out the best techniques for production.

Walnut trees don’t produce as much sap as maples, and the sap has less sugar. In short, it takes more to make less. And unlike maple, walnut sap contains naturally occurring pectin, which when it’s boiled down, becomes a thick goo — making the syrup difficult to filter.

But Mongold is undeterred by these challenges, and he’s even found a creative use for the pectin.

“About a year ago, I was listening to 89.5 PBS here in Petersburg,” Mongold said. “And it was talking about the Mayo Clinic working with pectin for arthritis and gout.”

Mongold has had both. So ever since, he’s been taking a teaspoon of walnut pectin in his morning coffee. While pectin isn’t FDA approved for this purpose, Gary says it has relieved pain from his arthritis.

Using the pectin — like making the syrup itself — is an experiment. And this season, there was another unpredictable variable at play.

Adapting To A Warm Winter

“It hasn’t been a very good season for sap to run,” Mongold said. “Mother Nature has not given us very good weather.”

Last year, Mongold got about 17 gallons of syrup. This year he added even more taps but by mid-March, he’d only gotten five gallons.

In order for sap to run, temperatures need to reach below freezing at night and above freezing during the day.

“When we get this climate change like we’re having and get three 70 degree days in February, that just puts a stop to everything,” he said.

Back in Highland County, Virginia, temperatures in February averaged 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the second warmest February on record, followed by 2017.

“Honestly, in my 71 years, I’ve never seen a February like this,” Pat Lowry said, shaking his head.

Even the more conventional maple syrup producers were forced to adapt — like Terri Puffenbarger and her husband Doug. There’s a long legacy of maple syrup production in the Puffenbarger lineage but they’re not interested in making different types of tree syrups or trying out infusions.

“We don’t want to do that,” Terri Puffenbarger said. “We just want the real deal and that’s what we’re doing.”

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

This year, however, the warm February dried up maple production mid season. So when a cold snap hit in March, right around the maple festival, Doug Puffenbarger decided to try something different. He re-tapped his maple trees — drilling new holes in hopes of collecting fresh sap.

“He’s never done that before,” Terri Puffenbarger said. “But with the warm temperatures in February, the climate is changing and that might be a new thing we’re gonna do.”

Mongold ended up re-tapping his walnut trees, too. He got 5 more gallons of syrup, bringing his total for this year up to 10 gallons. And although it’s significantly less than last year, he’s optimistic.

“It is kind of risky, I reckon,” he said. “But you know, I don’t look for every year to be bad. There’s gonna be a lot of good years.”

Mongold’s already thinking about next year. Around this area, tree sap generally runs from the end of January through the end of March. But Mongold thinks that pattern might be changing. So this coming year, he plans to start tapping the first week of December.

And in Highland County, there’s talk of switching the March maple festival to earlier in the season, too — when there’s a higher likelihood of cold nights, warm days and sugar water on the boil.

Maple Sugar Road in Highland County, Virginia.

*Credit Clara Haizlett/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

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Butcher Apprentices, Carpet Artists And Cuz’s BBQ, Inside Appalachia

This week on Inside Appalachia, we visit with Jerry Machen of Kingsport, Tennessee. When he first started making art from old carpets, his wife Linda wasn’t impressed. We also meet the devoted family and friends of Cuz’s Uptown Barbeque, who rallied behind the acclaimed Appalachian restaurant during a hard time. And, it used to be that every grocery store had a trained butcher behind the counter. But that’s not the case so much today. So the owner of a Charleston abattre had an idea.

This week, we visit with Jerry Machen of Kingsport, Tennessee. When he first started making art from old carpets, his wife Linda wasn’t impressed.

We also meet the devoted family and friends of Cuz’s Uptown Barbeque, who rallied behind the acclaimed Appalachian restaurant during a hard time.

And, it used to be that every grocery store had a trained butcher behind the counter. But that’s not the case so much today. So the owner of a Charleston abattre had an idea.

You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

In This Episode:

Buzz Foods To Train New Generation Of Butchers

Zack Harold explores the meat industry and learns about Buzz Food Service’s mission to create more meatcutters. *Credit: Zack Harold*/*West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

The pandemic has shown how fragile our food supply chain can be. Distribution bottlenecks and breakdowns at processing plants have meant some products went missing from grocery store shelves.

That’s why Buzz Food Service in Charleston set out to build a new model for locally raised meat. But it needed butchers to make that work — but butchers can be scarce. So Buzz came up with an old-fashioned solution: an apprenticeship program.

Folkways Reporter Zack Harold has the story.

A Carpet Craftsman Creates Carpet Art

Lots of families live with furniture, silverware, and rugs, but we sometimes take them for granted. We seldom think about who makes these items — or where to turn when they need repaired.

One man in Kingsport, Tennessee, has been building and repairing carpets and rugs for more than 50 years. For Jerry Machen, Sr., the business not only provides him with a livelihood — but also an opportunity for expression and discovery.

Folkways Reporter Nicole Musgrave has the story.

Passover Observed During The Civil War

In 1862 during the Civil War, 20 Jewish Union soldiers came together in southern West Virginia for a Passover feast known as a seder. This year, a group in Beckley, West Virginia, recognized that event.

WVPB Reporter Shepherd Snyder spoke with Joseph Golden of Beckley’s Temple Beth El congregation and Drew Gruber of Civil War Trails about this event’s historical significance.

A Community Rallies Around Cuz’s Barbecue

Cuz’s Uptown Barbecue offers more than one kind of flavor. *Credit: Connie Bailey Kitts/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

People love to argue over which barbecue sauce is most authentic—vinegar, tomato or mustard. But Cuz’s Uptown Barbeque in Tazewell County, Virginia, is distinguished by something entirely different. For one thing, its food is inspired by Asian cuisine and local mountain specialities. You can find things on its menu like Morel mushrooms, cheesy egg rolls, and country ham caprese.

Folkways Reporter Connie Bailey Kitts and her family stopped in at Cuz’s for dinner and brought us us this story.

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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Andrea Tomasi, The Steel Drivers, Erik Vincent and Mary Hott.

Bill Lynch is our producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Zander Aloi also helped produce this episode.

You can send us an email at InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.

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Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.