Big Whoopie
A journey across Pennsylvania’s Amish Country in search of the true history of America’s hottest treat, the unassuming whoopie pie.
© DOMINIQUE MESSIHI
"If you see me shaking my fist a lot, it’s because I’m excited, not because I’m angry,” warns Lindsey Love. The Philadelphia-based baker is heading to Lancaster County for the first time since she opened Coco Love Homemade, her online business specializing in whoopie pies. Driving out of the city, suburbs fade into lush, prosperous-looking farms that are stretched over gently rolling hills. (“So pretty!” says Love, her fist going.) Gradually the road narrows, and signs sprout from the shoulder warning of horse-and-buggy traffic. Victorian brick houses advertise quilts, barnwood furniture and — the raison d’etre for our expedition — whoopie pies.
The confection, which consists of sugary frosting sandwiched between two moist, cake-y cookies, made national news this year when the Maine Legislature debated crowning the whoopie its state dessert. Not only did it seem, well, silly for a sober lawmaking body to treat the subject with such gravity, but it also sparked protests from outraged Pennsylvanians, who argued that their own claim on the whoopie was much older. It was, they said, the Pennsylvania Dutch and local Amish who invented the dessert and later brought it to Maine. While Lancaster County’s Pennsylvania Dutch, Mennonites and Amish are far too modest to anoint any one individual inventor of the whoopie pie, material evidence and local lore points to their families having made it since well before Labadie’s Bakery in Lewiston, ME, started selling them in 1925. Maine ultimately settled on the whoopie pie as its state “treat” (lest the wild blueberry pie raise its own protest), and the issue of ownership has never been resolved to either state’s satisfaction.
Love, for one, is grateful for the Maine-Pennsylvania debate — it’s been quite a boon for a newcomer to the whoopie pie game. She considers this trip not only a recipe-scouting mission — she makes whoopies the Pennsylvania way, with a frosting filling, rather than a marshmallow fluff filling, as Mainers do — but also a pilgrimage to the land that birthed her enterprise, to trace its origin. Love started Coco Love Homemade in 2010, after quitting a job as a buyer for Urban Outfitters. Burnt out from the corporate grind, she took up baking — a lifelong hobby — professionally at the suggestion of friends. Now, Love bakes a few hundred pies a week to sell at local coffee shops and by mail order.
And she’s far from being the only newcomer to the whoopie pie biz: In the past few years, ever since the cupcake was declared passé by forward-thinking foodistas, whoopie pie bakeries have popped up all over New York (where famed cupcakerie Magnolia has also started making them), Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and her own Philadelphia. Love had always enjoyed baking whoopie pies, so it seemed like a perfect fit. “I think they’re a much better design than a cupcake,” she says. “I make my whoopies on the small side, so you can eat it with one hand, while you’re driving a car.” Her timing couldn’t have been better: She had no idea whoopies would become the phenomenon they have; she just knew that they were delicious and fun to eat. And now she’s eager to discover the true origins of what she hopes will be the biggest dessert craze of the next few years.
Our first stop is Bird-in-Hand Bakery in Bird-in-Hand, PA, one of the spots that Love is so fist-shakingly excited to see. Sitting at a shaded café table outside the bakery, with cornfields as far as the eye can see as a backdrop, co-owner Jim Smucker tells us that his kitchen uses the same recipe his mother learned from her mother. His family homestead is 100 years old, and the whoopie pie recipe, by his calculation, is just as old. Today, the whole crossroads of Bird-in-Hand (disappointingly there’s no Two-in-Bush) is something of a Smucker whoopie pie enterprise: Across the road is a sprawling farmers market/restaurant/hotel building where the Smuckers also sell the treats.
“We’ve added some flavors — the red velvet is really popular, peanut butter, pumpkin — but the chocolate is the original. That’s my family’s recipe.” When Love asks if the pumpkin is seasonal, Smucker says that, in fact, the family grows its own pumpkins, which they preserve and use year-round. “For some reason, people will only eat pumpkin pie in the fall, but they’ll eat pumpkin whoopie pie year-round.” Still, the original chocolate whoopie pie with vanilla filling is his favorite: “I grew up eating those. I just keep them in the freezer and eat them frozen.”
“Isn’t it amazing how well they freeze?” Love says. “I have to freeze mine to get them into their little cellophane bags, and it makes the cake even moister and squishier.” Both agree that the mark of a good whoopie pie is its cake-y skin stuck to the wrapper.
Now that Smucker is talking, Love’s ready to get down to nitty-gritty. She wants to know how the whoopie pies are made at Bird-in-Hand. The only way the bakery has changed its production since opening in the 1960s, Smucker says, is the addition of an automatic dispenser for the batter — a source of jealousy for Love, who hand-pipes all of her batter. Smucker’s vanilla frosting is the same vegetable shortening-based recipe his family has used for generations (Love prefers a butter-based frosting, especially because she sources her butter in Lancaster County; both she and Smucker agree that Amish butter is best, and that they’re lucky — and proud — to be able to buy local dairy and flour). Smucker supports local business, because what’s good for Pennsylvania is good for him and his business — including the interstate row over whoopie pie ownership.
“Of course, we know whoopie pies are from this area — but the battle is all in good fun,” he says. “We love whoopie pies, and we’re glad to have more people discovering them.” The whoopie pie creation story that he knows is the common one: Frugal Amish housewives didn’t want to waste any little bit of cake batter, so they made little pies. When their husbands found the treat in their lunch pails after a morning of strenuous labor in the fields, they would shout “Whoopie!” In the line of business, Smucker’s talked to countless people about the origin of whoopie pies, but has never met anyone claiming to know who, exactly, invented them. Still, he’s confident they are Pennsylvania natives. He’s been up to Maine, he says, and while he saw how widespread the treat was there — one bakery he visited even offered a make-your-own-whoopie-pie station — he whispers conspiratorially, “But they’re not as good.”
At a roadside farm stand, the Amish woman selling whoopie pies bows her head and gives a shy shrug when asked about their origin — she uses a family recipe and seems to care little about its provence. And maybe asking the Amish for the confection’s creation story is a lost cause anyway; some historians think that the sweet treat goes back even further. Folklorist Susan Kalcik famously told The Tribune-Democrat (a newspaper based in Johnstown, PA) that Medieval Germans made a similar cream-filled cake, suggesting that the whoopie pie’s roots are buried far deeper than grandma’s secret recipe. The Bienenstich (bee-sting) cake is composed of two large, round cakes filled with vanilla custard and coated in a honey glaze and was first created in the 15th century. It makes perfect sense that the Pennsylvania Dutch — actually the Pennsylvania Deutsch, or Germans — might have brought this style of cake layering along with them to Lancaster in the 1720s. Mix the Old World honey pastry with New World Anabaptist frugality, and you have a whoopie pie.
From their first New World settlements in Lancaster, Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch communities have spread across the state and on to other parts of the country — Maine included — presumably taking whoopie pies with them. In western Pennsylvania’s coal-mining country — where Morrellville’s now-closed Harris & Boyar Bakery also claimed to have invented them — they’re called “gobs.” Kalcik explains that lumps of coal refuse are sometimes referred to as gobs, and coal miners (who carried whoopie pies in their lunch pails) may have given them that nickname. Today, gobs are made by Yost’s Dutch Maid Bakery in Johnstown, PA, and distributed to a local gas station chain, Sheetz, among other outlets. Smucker has heard them called gobs in Indiana, too, which boasts its own notable collection of Amish communities.
Back in Lancaster, though, we’re still on the hunt for the original whoopie. Leaving Smucker and Bird-in-Hand behind, we drive four miles past a shopping mall and a huge, steamboat-shaped hotel to the Hershey Farm Restaurant & Inn, which hosts the annual Whoopie Pie Festival each September.
The sprawling property is accented by a massive statue of a man in Amish garb — “like a Lancaster Paul Bunyan!” Love says, insisting we take pictures with him. The bakery here has served whoopie pies as far back as anybody can remember, according to employee Anne Faix, who helped launch the fair to promote the pie. In addition to whoopie pie scavenger hunts, checker games and long-distance throwing contests, there are 100 flavors on sale, from s’mores to peanut butter and jelly and bananastrawberry-orange. “We make 19,000 whoopie pies to sell at the festival, and we’re planning to make the world’s largest,” Faix says. A few weeks after our visit and this year’s whoopie festivities, she called to concede that they’d fallen short of the 1,062-pounder produced in Maine. Still, Faix said cheerily, it was “over five feet around and weighed more than 600 pounds — an authentic whoopie pie.”
Since she started working at Hershey Farm in 2005, Faix says she’s seen interest in whoopie pies grow every year. The farm even offers a “Making Whoopie” camp, where guests learn how to make the pies. And there’s nothing automated here; the Hershey Farm bakery uses an ice cream scoop to plop batter onto a pan and then to scoop buttercream filling into each one. Altogether, Faix says, they bake 1,000 to 1,500 whoopie pies a week, and more in those hectic weeks leading up to the festival.
Along every roadside are horse-drawn buggies, Amish riding scooters (their religion prohibits bicycles, but not nonmotorized scooters) and farm stands selling the gooey gobs. These simple treats with their humble roots — hardly seeming a candidate to storm the chicest bakeries in the country’s biggest cities — are as much a part of the local culture as farming and one-room schoolhouses. That the normally reserved locals were willing to challenge another state to protect their ancestral pastry shows that the whoopie pie will always be important to Lancaster County and Pennsylvania.
For Love, it was a journey to the motherland; in essence, a chance to see how her business got its start. And while it would be impossible to get to the definitive origin of this myth-laden sweet, the baker was invigorated by visiting some of the traditional producers who share her passion for it. “I’m so glad we did this,” she says, swelling with pride in the legacy she’s a part of. As we point the car east towards Philadelphia, she takes one last look in the rearview mirror, smiles to herself and shakes her fist.
As Easy As Pie
The whoopie isn’t the only dessert in town.
One dessert whose Amish origins aren’t in dispute is the shoofly pie. It’s a piecrust with a layer of moist, cake-like substance that’s similar to pecan pie, minus the pecans, made of molasses and brown sugar, which is then topped by a crumb topping. A “wet-bottom” pie has a thin crust, so the spongy molasses layer soaks through it. The “dry-bottom” has a more substantial crust. The ubiquitous dessert got its name because when women would leave the pie to cool on the windowsill, the sugar would attract flies that had to be shooed away. Jim Smucker of Bird-in-Hand Bakery considers this the iconic dessert of the region — so much so that it inspired a hit song by Dinah Shore. The best part? This gooey concoction is meant for breakfast.
Dutch Haven Shoofly Pie Bakery
2857A Lincoln Hwy E, Ronks, PA (39 miles from Harrisburg) 717-687-0111; www.dutchhaven.com
Beiler’s Bakery
At Reading Terminal Market 51 N 12th St, Philadelphia; 215-351-0735; www.readingterminalmarket.org
Allentown Fairgrounds Farmers Market
17th and Chew sts, Allentown; 610-432-8425; www.fairgroundfarmersmkt.com
If You Go
BIRD-IN-HAND BAKERY
2715 Old Philadelphia Pike, Bird-in-Hand (60 miles from Philadelphia); 800-655-8780; www.bird-in-hand.com
HERSHEY FARM RESTAURANT & INN
Rte 896, Strasburg (57 miles from Philadelphia); 800-827-8635; www.hersheyfarm.com
COCO LOVE HOMEMADE
Philadelphia; www.cocolovehomemade.com
SHEETZ
208 Haynes St, Johnstown (86 miles from Pittsburgh); 814-536-7624 *Yost’s Dutch Maid Bakery closed its retail location, but still distributes Gobs regionally to Sheetz gas stations, and sells them via mail order (gobsrus@gmail.com).
Reader Comments
- Apparently Portland Magazine disagrees with you....
http://www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/2012/01/just-desserts/
(Posted on 12 Jan 2012)
