My First Cooking Contest
I just registered for my first cooking contest. I am making salsa for the Avalon Park Chili Cook Off. Newspaper food editors were often the judges of local and national cooking competition.
In 1968, there were 150 food editors—of both newspaper and magazine writers—who attended the Pillbury Bake Off. Another ten food editors would actually judge the finalists, including Benet of the San Francisco Chronicle and Volpe of the Pittsburgh Press. As in previous meetings, this meant a chance to advertisers to share their products or technologies and a chance for the editors to learn about local foods among the intended propaganda. The women learned about new General Electric products and new Pillsbury campaign to develop protein-rich drink for the El Salvador market as a way to combat malnutrition.
Carol McCready Hartley was the longtime food editor at the Phoenix Gazette. Armed with a degree in home economics, she oversaw one of the largest food sections in the country at fifty pages. At the time, Phoenix was popular with food companies as a city to test products because it was a rather isolated market. In 1969, she was a judge in the national Pillsbury Bake-Off when her group chose a recipe that involved rolling a marshmallow in butter and then wrapping it in a Pillsbury crescent roll and baking it. The winning entry became a “landmark recipe in the history of the bake-off,” as culinary historian Laura Shapiro described it. “People made them and made them and made them.”
