Faith Works 1-19-24

Faith Works 1-19-24
Jeff Gill

Comfort foods and a culture of community
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Don't worry, I'll get back to shredded chicken sandwiches here in a bit. Didn't think I was done, did you?

During the bowl games, when the West Virginia Mountaineers were playing in a mayonnaise themed contest, the booth commentators took a break from play to sample pepperoni rolls.

Now, WVU is in Morgantown; Fairmont, West Virginia claims it is the one true home of pepperoni rolls, but you can find them up and down the Monongahela River all the way north to Pittsburgh, and south a ways. There are pepperoni roll outposts down towards Parkersburg and even around Charleston, and the state has adopted it their state food.

The roots are underground: they were made as a simple lunch to take down into the coal mines. Sticks of pepperoni, beloved of the southern Italians who were recruited by the thousands in the early 1900s, baked into small loaves which you could put into your pocket. Some today still maintain a true pepperoni roll has sticks baked longwise into the roll, but you can find them with a sheaf of pepperoni slices or even ground pepperoni in the dough.

During the Mountaineer football victory, the on air crew ate pepperoni rolls . . . with mayo. This provoked the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia to strongly protest, suggesting penance was needed, while adding that the use of Miracle Whip on a pepperoni roll is an abomination. It was all in good fun, sort of. And yet said with a hint of seriousness.

Comfort foods are close to our hearts, and how to make them can be a ritual with religious overtones. They have a history, and we are telling a story to ourselves, and about ourselves, as we make and consume them. This is most obvious every Thanksgiving, and in many Christmas cookie recipes, but it's true all year long in certain ways.

Which brings me back to shredded chicken sandwiches. When I left here and we moved to Fairmont, West Virginia for six years, on the counter as a housewarming gift on our arrival was a bag of pepperoni rolls from Giuseppe Argiro's original bakery. We learned the story, and I came to understand the linkage to history and struggle and sacrifice every time one was eaten, even if I've never worked in a coal mine. And the core pepperoni roll territory tracks with the seams of coal and the mine shafts of West Virginia.

What's going on behind our fascination with shredded chicken sandwiches? One story claims that back a hundred years or so, every family raised chickens, and they laid eggs; you didn't kill a chicken until it stopped laying, by which time they were pretty tough, so you had to cook them down long and slow in a cream sauce. Yeah, I can see that.

But chickens are everywhere. We aren't and never have been the chicken capital of the world, or even Ohio. That doesn't explain the very precise footprint of shredded chicken commonality, exploding out of an apparent Licking County epicenter and sprawling north and west across the state.

We may never know the actual origin of the shredded chicken sandwich as we have it today, the core recipe of a can of boneless chicken, a tube of crackers crushed, and a can of cream soup, mixed together and simmered at length, served up on a hamburger bun. But I suspect I know how it spread as it did.

And my guess has to do with finding an unexpected outpost of shredded chicken . . . in Fairmont, West Virginia. The connection isn't coal mining, but something our two areas have in common besides crock pots and roasters.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's nearing an end (a temporary one) to his shredded digression into 2024. Tell him what foods keep you grounded at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.