[Sca-cooks] OOP: NY Times article on State Fair food competitions
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Wed Aug 16 05:49:04 PDT 2006
I was intrigued by the statement that the people that have first-hand
knowledge on how to pickle a peach are all dying off...
Adamantius
> August 16, 2006
>
> Pickles, Pies and Blue-Ribbon Biscotti
>
> By JULIA MOSKIN
> THE corn dogs are coming. From Clackamas County in Oregon to the
> Iowa State Fair, already in full swing, to the Champlain Valley in
> Vermont, hundreds of state and county fairs will take place between
> now and Labor Day. Fairgoers will plan their days around lemonade,
> funnel cakes and pork chops on a stick.
>
> But they may not find the jars of apple butter and the pickled
> peaches that their grandparents admired.
>
> Cooking competitions still thrive on the nation’s fairgrounds
> despite declining overall attendance at fairs. New contestants of
> all ages and more men are venturing into the fray, and cash prizes
> are bigger than ever. But some traditional skills, like canning
> vegetables and preserving meat, are falling away.
>
> Taking their place are ambitious new categories, like ones for
> bagels and biscotti, that would have surprised fairgoers a
> generation ago. Summoning skills they did not need before, judges
> in Iowa are critiquing ostrich entrees this week alongside the
> apple pies and the pork barbecue they have long encountered.
>
> “Cooking and gardening are almost hobbies now, not necessary for
> survival as they were when the fairs began,” said Diane Roupe, a
> longtime judge at the Iowa fair. “But the spirit is just as
> competitive as it always has been.”
>
> Eileen Gannon, a senior financial consultant for Smith Barney in
> Des Moines, has won more than 140 ribbons over the last 20 years at
> the Iowa fair, including last Thursday’s victory for honey from her
> beehives. She said new competitors flock to the fair now that
> cooking has lost its stigma as women’s work, a reputation it had in
> the early years of the feminist movement.
>
> “Fifteen years ago I felt like I had to hide my fair work from the
> office because it would compromise my professional image, but now I
> send the extra cakes to my clients,” she said. “There is so much
> more respect for these domestic arts than there was 15 years ago.”
>
> To draw men into the fray, many fairs have opened men-only baking
> divisions.
>
> “We learned that men wanted to enter in baking but were intimidated
> by the skills of the regular competitors,” said Lyn Jarvis,
> culinary supervisor of the Champlain Valley Fair in Vermont, which
> offered its first men-only contest in 1990. “Now they are winning
> best in show ribbons.” (The Champlain Valley Fair will be held in
> Essex Junction, Vt., Aug. 26 through Sept. 4.)
>
> Guy-friendly cooking contests have also begun padding the
> entertainment schedule at many fairs. Formal judging of canned and
> baked goods often takes place out of the spotlight, or before a
> fair begins, but chicken wing cook-offs and barbecue contests have
> been accepted as spectator sports.
>
> Next weekend the Dutchess County Fair, which begins on Tuesday and
> ends on Aug. 27 in Rhinebeck, N.Y., will pit local firefighters
> against the county sheriff’s department in a hugely popular “Iron
> Chef”-style cooking contest. (The secret ingredient is locally
> grown, like apples or corn.)
>
> And sponsors like King Arthur Flour, Hershey’s cocoa and Vlasic
> pickles are adopting bigger chunks of the competition, pushing up
> the prize money: last week Tone Brothers, the spice producer in
> Ankeny, Iowa, awarded $3,000 for the best cinnamon roll at the Iowa
> State Fair to Marianne Carlson of Jefferson, Iowa. This year’s
> overall prize money in the food division is $55,000, the most it
> has ever been.
>
> The Iowa fair’s food competition is the biggest one in the country.
> But the changes are playing out at smaller fairs as well.
>
> Anne Murray has won three best in show ribbons at the Dutchess
> County Fair in New York. She has a Ph.D. in engineering and works
> long hours at I.B.M. in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Having won her first
> time out with an apricot-filled yeast bread, she said she found the
> ribbons “addictive” and now competes every year. Ms. Murray grew up
> in the suburbs of Philadelphia, without much connection to farming.
> “But my mother made her own jam, and once you taste that you can’t
> go back,” she said. “A lot of people don’t get that experience
> anymore.”
>
> Many of the serious competitors are only a generation or two
> removed from working farms. Sue Silkworth, a teacher in
> Poughkeepsie, in Dutchess County, grows much of the fruit for her
> winning preserves, like her blueberry basil and five-spice rhubarb
> jams, in a huge kitchen garden rimmed with grapevines that has been
> in her family for generations. And Jay Trapp, an architect and
> repeat winner for breads at the same fair, grew up in farm country
> in South Carolina, “shelling butter beans in front of the
> television every night,” he said. “That food was made with care — I
> won’t say love because it sounds too schmaltzy — and it did taste
> different.”
>
> Herb Eckhouse, another Iowa native, also sees the fair as a part of
> a bigger picture: the regeneration of American respect for flavor.
> “Before Iowa had all this artisanal goat cheese and fancy grass-fed
> beef and organic dairy, these fairs were already about the bounty
> of the land and about craftsmanship,” he said.
>
> Mr. Eckhouse returned to the state in 2004 after spending three
> years in Parma, Italy, learning to cure prosciutto and pancetta.
> His company, La Quercia, is sponsoring a contest at the fair. First
> prize is half a prosciutto, he said. “As hard as McDonald’s tries
> to push us out of the kitchen, and although this country produces
> ever greater quantities of undistinguished food, people are waking
> up to the fact that a lot of our food just doesn’t taste good,” he
> said.
>
> The competitors themselves, wherever they stand on American
> agricultural policy, are in it for the ribbons. “Competing at the
> fair is like cooking for a dinner party,” Ms. Gannon said. “It’s
> nice to cook for yourself, but isn’t it more fun to show people
> what you can do?”
>
> Having fun is easy; winning is hard. Serious competitors spend
> hours poring over the exhibitors’ handbooks, creating elaborate
> strategies and second-guessing their rivals and the judges. “You
> want to look for categories that the regulars might not enter,”
> said Terry Jannuzzo, whose chocolate-apricot truffles won a best in
> class ribbon for candy at Dutchess. “I’m afraid I’ll never win best
> in show because my pie crusts aren’t good enough, and it’s almost
> always a pie that wins,” she said, sighing. “The judges love pie.”
>
> In the more rigorous programs, judges are still home economics
> teachers or food science faculty members; elsewhere, local
> television hosts or restaurant owners fill in. Although some fairs
> have relaxed their standards in the face of declining entries, many
> judges see themselves as the standard-bearers for all-natural, top-
> quality, handmade food in America. “These fairs began as education
> for farmers and farm wives, and we try to honor what they did,”
> said Ms. Roupe, who has been Iowa’s head canning judge since 2004.
> (She won 99 ribbons as a competitor before she began judging.)
>
> Most exhibitors’ handbooks still prohibit shortcuts like graham
> cracker pie crusts, cake mixes and bread machines, and the Missouri
> State Fair provides specific written standards that competitors
> should aspire to. Cakes “should be light, with fine, even texture,
> moist and velvety but not sticky.” For yeast breads, “flavor should
> be pleasant with bland nutlike flavor.”
>
> Cathy Poluzzi, co-chairwoman of the food competition at the
> Dutchess fair, sees herself as a gatekeeper and a den mother,
> fielding calls from frantic bakers and novice canners throughout
> the year. “Canning is the hardest thing to learn from a book, and
> the women who really knew how to do it are all gone,” she said.
> “The new ones don’t even know how to choose a peach that won’t turn
> to mush, poor things.”
>
> On Saturday this year’s competitors will drop off their entries and
> leave them to the tender mercies of the judges, who will deliberate
> behind closed doors. Ms. Poluzzi’s judges are held to a high
> standard: instead of awarding ribbons, they must give a written
> critique of each entry that will help competitors correct their
> mistakes. Overbeating is a common problem, she said, and “check
> your oven temperature” is the most common critique.
>
> Ms. Poluzzi, according to those who compete under her, is tough but
> impartial, and unswayed by frills. Her rules prohibit decorative
> hats on jars of canned food, cookies more than three inches in
> diameter and all postbaking toppings, like frostings, glazes and
> even a dusting of confectioners’ sugar.
>
> “Oh, yes,” she said. “People try to hide a multitude of sins with
> icing.”
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