Cookoff: Recipe Fever in America - Rilegato

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 line squealed. No one could say for sure, though. No one knew what the Tunnel-of- Fudge woman looked like despite her celebrity.

I quickly realized what the contest meant for these contestants. These were everyday people who, thanks to an often thankless task, cooking, had had something big happen to them. From the confines of their kitchens they had catapulted to a national stage. Reporters pumped them for their opinions on fresh garlic versus powdered. TV crews crowded around their stoves. Company bigwigs toasted them. Most of the contestants had reached that age when you begin to wonder, glumly, if you will ever make your mark, if anything thrilling will ever happen to you again. Well, it had. Their dreamy smiles said so.

By the time I went to the press orientation that first Sunday afternoon, I was completely taken with the cookoff. Consequently, I was surprised by how blasé so many of my colleagues were. It turned out that many of the reporters, if not most, had been there before. They were here primarily to soak up Pillsbury’s considerable attentions, including breakfast in bed. I struck up a quick conversation with a brisk food editor in cowboy boots, a contest veteran who made it clear that she planned to spend as little time with the contestants as possible. “You’re going to meet a lot of trailer trash,” she warned me.

I really hadn’t expected trailer trash; I had expected stereotypical midwestern homemakers galore. The first surprise was that California supplied most of the contestants, followed by New York. I found an amazing cross section of Americans, given that most of the contestants were white, middle-class, middle- aged women. I talked with an airline flight scheduler from rural Pennsylvania who told me on the contest floor, as she calmly swabbed mustard sauce on a triangle of crescent refrigerator dough, “This is nothing compared to the blizzard of ’93.” I met a type-A video producer from Washington, D.C., who was decked out in black and bent on winning the big bucks by sending his mayonnaise-lathered chicken Waldorf pizza in dead last to the judges. I interviewed a paramedic and mother of three teenagers from North Carolina who doused some leftover squash with Italian dressing and threw it in a sauté pan, thus planting the seed for what became Fiesta Veggies, her winning entry. What if she won, I asked her. How would she spend the money? She wasn’t sure, thought a moment, and said, “My husband’s car just came out of the shop and mine just went in.”

So many different roads led here. I met Tracie Ojakangas, a nurse from Missouri with an Elizabethan forehead, fair skin, red hair, and a lilting northern midwestern accent. During the two years prior to the contest, Ojakangas had endured Lyme disease and then breast cancer. Her mother-in-law, who won second place in the 1958 Pillsbury Bake-Off® contest with Chunk o’ Cheese Bread, encouraged her to enter to distract her from the rigors of chemotherapy, which had roused the Lyme disease. Despite nausea and exhaustion, Ojakangas came up with three recipes, including Mozzarella and Pesto Crescent Tarts, a big hit with her two young sons and her winning entry. Fate, however, was not finished with her. During the few months leading up to the contest, doctors spotted the shadow of a brain tumor on an X ray, benign but in a bad spot. Two and a half weeks shy of the competition, Ojakangas’s tumor was zapped with gamma rays for thirteen hours.

She arrived in San Francisco with her husband, fatigued yet exhilarated. Ojakangas couldn’t help reading her cooking conquest as a sign, a sign that a rip tide of bad luck may have turned because of a can of Pillsbury Refrigerated Crescent Dinner Rolls, two tablespoons of bottled pesto, two medium tomatoes, one small red onion, one to two teaspoons of fresh rosemary, a half cup of shredded mozzarella, and a quarter cup of shredded Parmesan. If you could get Lyme disease, breast cancer, and a brain tumor all in a row, why couldn’t you win $1 million for a recipe?

I met Millie D’Elia, a stylish if shrunken seventy-three-year-old retired secretary who arrived at the contest with a prepared sound bite. “I feel like Susan Lucci,” she repeated to reporters, Pillsbury execs, and, at times, no one in particular, referring to the soap opera star who was annually nominated for a daytime Emmy, only to lose again and again. Compared to D’Elia, though, Lucci got off easy. “She only did it eighteen times,” D’Elia cracked.

D’Elia had entered some thirty-five times, only missing a few when her two children were young. She still had an entry form from the original 1949 contest, now a collectible, she told me. That year D’Elia was a twenty-two-year-old bookkeeper for Singer and was still living in Westchester County with her seven brothers and sisters and widower father. By the time the hand of Pillsbury chose her as a contestant, D’Elia was living on Long Island in a mother-in-law’s apartment in her daughter’s home.

The only problem was that this Italian-American cook had been picked for her least favorite entry, Creamy Parmesan Broccoli, for which she smothered frozen broccoli with a white sludge of Parmesan cheese, sour cream, and mayonnaise. She added toasted pine nuts to the quasi-broccoli-cheese casserole for a “gourmet touch.” Broccoli would never win the grand prize, and D’Elia knew it. After her long wait, all she could hope for was a $2,000 prize. What’s more, she couldn’t demonstrate her substantial Italian- American cooking chops with her broccoli dish. The longed-for experience of a lifetime had proven a bit anticlimactic. She even had trouble getting a relative or friend to accompany her.

Then I stumbled upon a subculture: the contesters. This group of about two thousand cooks, mostly women, makes a serious hobby if not a near career out of cooking contests. They put in long hours researching trends and winning recipes, and, like mad inventors, they endlessly tinker with their creations. Their time and effort pays off. Their names figure prominently on winners’ lists of all kinds of national cooking contests.

At the 2000 competition there were ten contesters of various levels of...