The success of frozen pizza, in general, and Minnesota’s Totino’s company, in particular, caught his eye and he wanted to move quickly into that arena. He would, of course, develop his own frozen pizza, but Paulucci had another idea. Chun King churned out thousands of mini egg rolls per day and Jeno figured that an egg roll wrapper could be filled with just about anything. He told his vice president of research and development to turn this idea into reality. The VP, in turn, assigned the task to Beatrice (Luoma) Ojakangas, by coincidence, the older sister of the engineer who had developed the egg roll machine for Chun King.

If the general feeling toward pizza rolls in the 2020s is that they’re for busy kids or stoned adults (as is the consensus in those Reddit discussions explaining the food to non-Americans, which I think tracks with the broader cultural understanding of who eats them today), in the 1960s, they were something different: a new and nifty treat you could serve as a canapé.

In many ways, then, pizza rolls are the perfect American food: a slightly ridiculous and nontraditional dish that pulls from multiple cultural sources outside this country. Their very existence, and the way in which they’re sold, symbolizes the abundance of the USA—its richness of cultures, its excess of resources, its delight in just kinda making things up and seeing if they work.

American food, as a broad-brush concept, is defined not by a specific set of dishes or flavors but by its incredible variety. Obviously—obviously—you can find lots of tasty food in the USA and plenty of regional specialties. But many of those local delicacies have faded away over the years, and as a nation, our signature thing is that you can get, for example, dozens of kinds of orange juice at any time of the year and hundreds of yogurt flavors, and seemingly every grocery store and strip mall has foods that originated in various far-off corners of the world.