The pepperoni roll reigns supreme in West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and the Rust Belt, but the unassuming dish is at home anywhere people appreciate greasy, salty meat stuffed in bread
When I was growing up in western Pennsylvania, pepperoni-stuffed bread rolls sustained many families on the cheap. In my hometown of New Castle — dubbed Tin Town because of its once prosperous tin industry — you could find roni rolls (best said with the most absurd Pittsburgh accent you can conjure) at bakeries, food marts, gas stations, and school cafeterias. I distinctly remember the town’s construction workers, farmers, and scrap resellers on their lunch breaks coming into the Tic Toc Food Mart, where my mom worked, to buy sleeves of lottery tickets, cigarettes, and roni rolls.
Like meatloaf, that other working-class staple, the pepperoni roll is a straight shooter. It’s exactly what it says. But something transcendent happens when slices of deli pepperoni are baked into a soft Italian loaf: The meat’s salt and fat seep into the bread, staining it a wonderful greasy orange, a process that’s paramount to a good pepperoni roll. Sometimes rolls contain mozzarella, which not only adds creaminess, but might escape through crevices in the bread and singe into crispy, frayed edges, like the kind that form around a broiled chicken parm. The platonic ideal roll is easily torn with your hands, never so dense that it becomes chewy, and the gooey treat is served chambré, at room temperature, like a glass of fine red wine.
