Cookoff Recipe Fever in America

INTRODUCTION START YOUR OVENS WRRRRRRRRRY I had hardly turned my calendar to January 2000 when a hefty envelope from Pillsbury thumped on my desk at a newspaper in Portland, Maine. Inside was a voluminous press packet on the upcoming 2000 Pillsbury Bake-Off? contest in San Francisco. Since going through my mail methodically was my preferred means to procrastinate writing, I had at it. Pillsbury had sent me this weighty missive because for the first time since 1984 Maine would send a contestant, a career postal worker who in her spare time had invented Cheesy Potato Corn Cakes using a box of Hungry Jack mashed potato flakes, a can of corn, and a pile of cheese, among other things. That brainstorm meant that Mary Jones, the single, fortyish mail handler with straight black hair down her back, now had a shot at winning a life-changing grand prize of $1 million. Jones's brainstorm gave me, a fine arts reporter who wrote about food in between penning thumbsuckers on Van Gogh or the Byzantine workings of museums, an official invite to the Pillsbury Bake-Off? contest. It took a while, about one extra grande latte with two shots, to get through the Pillsbury press materials. As I paged through the recipes, making gagging noises at the horrifying ones, such as the meat loaf with a jar of El Paso salsa mixed in, and read over the descriptions of the one hundred contestants'there was a junior high school student, a harpist from Hawaii, a cookbook collector, a funeral director?I was struck that this publicity event cum Americana refused to die. Rather, here we were in a new millennium when women are CEOs and American cooking had finally begun to get some respect, and cookoffs not only had endured but were actually thriving. National amateur cooking contests were born in an era long before Title IX and jogging bras, before a Mrs. could be a Ms., and before Sandra Day O?Connor had become the first female Supreme Court justice, albeit with a ?50s housewife hairdo. Cooking contests came long before cilantro became a pantry staple, before food processors, espresso makers, and bread machines crowded kitchen counters, before fusion this and that, before Julia, for God's sake. Why hadn't cookoffs gone the way of Tupperware parties, kid gloves, and pigs-in-a-blanket? How could any self-respecting woman or cook deign to enter such an anachronism? Off I went to find the answer. V I joined a small army of reporters and editors from around the country that converged on San Francisco to follow the 2000 cookoff contestants for three days as they ate, yakked, toured, and battled it out at the stoves for the million dollars. I, a thoroughly twenty-first-century career woman who also knew what to do with a chinois, arrived with an eyebrow arched, ready to make fun of the entire event like many of my colleagues. Instead, I quickly got caught up in the breathless excitement of the contest, the closest thing to sports that I had ever covered. I began handicapping with the contestants. I listened intently to the creation stories of their recipes. I, who had not sunk my teeth into a Pillsbury crescent roll in twenty-five years, began to think up a few recipe ideas for the baton of dough myself. Not that there wasn't a comic side to the Pillsbury Bake-Off? contest. That first afternoon I hovered as contestants giddily lined up to have their official photos taken and introduced themselves as their dishes (?Hi, I'm Chocolate Pudding Cake? or ?I'm Hawaiian Corn Salad?). They passed around their contest cookbooks, scribbling ?Best of Luck? and their names in the margins by their recipes like graduating high school seniors. They buzzed about the legendary Tunnel-of-Fudge Woman, the 1966 second-place winner whose cake had sparked Bundt-pan mania in this country. Rumor was that she was here in San Francisco. ?Really!? someone in lSutherland, Amy is the author of 'Cookoff Recipe Fever in America' with ISBN 9780670032518 and ISBN 0670032514.