GENARO C. ARMAS| State Journal-Register
BIRD-IN-HAND, Pa. — It consists of two round, textbook-thick, palm-sized chocolate cakes that sandwich a creamy vanilla filling to create one sinfully rich snack.
It’s the whoopie pie, a snack so beloved that residents in two states have cooked up a good-natured tug-of-war over which place is its rightful home: Maine or Pennsylvania.
A state legislator in Maine whipped up passions when he introduced a bill in January to make the whoopie pie Maine’s official state dessert.
Residents in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County say that’s just baloney. Those round mounds of cakey goodness originated from kitchens of the area’s Amish families, dating back generations, they say.
“We’ve had this thing going with the whoopie pie here for years and years and decades,” John Smucker, CEO of the family-run company that owns the
Bird-in-Hand Bakery, said as kitchen workers put together a batch of red velvet whoopie pies. “And all of a sudden they try to enter into the picture ... it’s just a bunch of nonsense.”
At the S. Clyde Weaver store in East Petersburg, staff piece together their version of the traditional chocolate-with-vanilla-filling variety.
“We do the original,” baker Nancy Rexroad said. “When something’s the original, you can’t improve on it.”
Maine state Rep. Paul Davis got things brewing with a bill to laud the whoopie pie. Davis got the idea from speaking with people at the Maine Whoopie Pie Festival, which last year attracted 4,000 visitors to Dover-Foxcroft, part of Davis’ district.
Amos Orcutt, president of the Maine Whoopie Pie Association, was one of the Mainers who lobbied Davis to make a stand. In a phone interview, Orcutt, whose full-time job is president of the University of Maine Foundation, said he got steamed after reading a New York Times story on whoopie pies in March 2009 that cited food historians on the likelihood that the whoopie pie got its start in Pennsylvania.
“Having grown up in Maine, I used that well-worn term ‘appalled and aghast,’ so I started looking into it,” Orcutt said. “A lot of our older alumni said, ‘Oh no, I remember whoopie pies as a child.’”
Davis said he’s been told Maine whoopie pies may date back as far as 1925. The website for Labadie’s Bakery in Lewiston, Maine, says bakers there started making whoopie pies that year.
About the time he read the Times story, Orcutt said, a local high school’s mock legislature exercise proposed a bill to give the whoopie pie the official-dessert designation.
“One thing led to another, and folks kept saying, ‘Well, gee, you’ve got to do something about it,’” Orcutt said. Davis estimates that about 400 to 500 bakeries — from commercial operators to small-town markets to individuals who sell kitchen -baked goods at farmers markets — sell whoopie pies.
Word of Davis’ bill reached the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau in Lancaster, and organizers there decided to answer back. They touted a website, www.saveourwhoopie.com, that likened Maine’s actions to “confectionary larceny.”
Area residents say Amish and other Pennsylvania Dutch families have passed down whoopie pie recipes for generations. Smucker said his bakery’s recipe dates back at least 50 years to his grandmother’s kitchen. Farther west in Pennsylvania, the treats were also known as “gobs.”
The Hershey Farm Restaurant and Inn, in Strasburg, Pa., makes more than 100 different flavors for its Whoopie Pie Festival, which started six years ago, several years before the Maine event.
And 21-year-old Josh Graupera of Lancaster got so worked up after hearing about Maine’s move that he and a friend organized a rally in downtown Lancaster attended by 100 people, including one person who carried a sign “Give Me Whoopie, or Give Me Death.”
All sides say they’re turning up the heat all in good fun.
“They can have their lobsters,” Graupera said.
Chocolate Whoopie Pies
From www.food.com
Pies:
1 cup sugar
6 tablespoons vegetable or canola oil
2 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup baking cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons milk
Filling:
4 tablespoons butter or shortening, softened to room temp
3 1/4 cups powdered sugar
4 tablespoons milk
1/4 teaspoon vanilla or mint extract
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Lightly coat cookie sheets with nonstick cooking spray.
Pies: In a mixing bowl, beat sugar and oil until crumbly. Add eggs and beat well. In separate bowl, combine flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt.
Gradually beat flour mixture into sugar mixture. Add milk and mix together well.
With lightly floured hands, roll dough into 1½-inch balls. Place balls 2 inches apart onto cookie sheets. Flatten balls slightly with bottom of lightly greased flat-bottom glass.
Bake 5 to 6 minutes or until tops are cracked. Cool 3 minutes before removing to wire racks to cool.
Filling: In a mixing bowl, beat together butter and powdered sugar. Beat in milk and extract until fluffy.
Pipe filling using pastry bag (or spread with knife) onto flat bottom of cooled pie and top with another pie to make a sandwich.
Makes 36.
