You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

This month in Dallas, 100 amateur cooks will march into a ballroom full of stoves and one will march out a millionaire.

Roger Lee’s buying an emu farm if he wins. (“It’s the meat of the future, you know.”) Jeanne Walker vows that, after replacing her decrepit 1979 Pinto, she’ll tithe 10% to the Baptist church. Roxanne Chan scarcely thinks about the money--it’s that trophy she wants. She’s won 330 cooking contests, but this is the big one and she’s been stalking it for half her adult life.

Michelle DeCoy, from her suburban kitchen, reports that her operative word is not winning but losing, as in losing one’s mind. “I’m doing all these weird projects to keep busy,” she said. “This week I’m breaking dishes and mosaic-ing my windowsills just to have something to do.”

As she spoke, dogs barked, a baby squawked and a small child shrieked, “Mommy! Mommy! Hey, Mommy! We want to eat!” DeCoy offered string cheese--this from a woman who, in scant weeks, hopes to parlay some brand-name flour into the nation’s premier quick bread.

“Yes, I’m in the Pillsbury Bake-Off,” the Bay Area mother repeated between peals of laughter. “I can’t believe it. I’m one of those Pillsbury Bake-Off women.”

“Mo-mmmmeeeeeeee!” somebody wailed, unimpressed. “We. Want. To eat!”

Being “one of those Pillsbury Bake-Off women”--or men--has for generations been a singular thing. On one hand, there are the 47 years of American tradition to be shouldered; on the other, there’s cash to be won. The Bake-Off, as veteran cooking contestants reverentially refer to it, has always carried a good-sized purse. But this year, a new ingredient has elevated it from the level of a competition to something more like a lottery: The grand prize is a million bucks.

That’s right. You can now win as much money in the Pillsbury Bake-Off as you could for winning the Nobel Prize. The development, akin to grafting the Publisher’s Clearinghouse onto, say, the Miss America Pageant, has set the competitive cooking world abuzz.

“It boggles the mind,” marveled Patricia Lapiezo, a 45-year-old La Mesa medical secretary whose Tuxedo Brownie Torte got her into the Bake-Off in 1992 and who will be back this year.

“To go from a $50,000 grand prize [at the last Bake-Off] to a million dollars--that’s an awful lot of money. No one can figure it out.”

Particularly since a survey done by Pillsbury after the last Bake-Off two years ago found that the overwhelming number of contestants were in it not for money but for fame--and still are.

“Oh, I would have entered anyway. It’s a national honor,” said finalist Michele Porter of Carpinteria, who has been entering cooking contests for 15 years. It does mystify her that of the 10 recipes she sent in, judges preferred one of her quick casseroles to her own favorite--a blueberry cheesecake made of Hungry Jack mashed-potato flakes--but she is still thrilled to have made the final cut.

“I think the homemakers out there are the best cooks in America. It boils down to that,” she said.

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In the decades since 1949, when Art Linkletter hosted the first Bake-Off at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and Eleanor Roosevelt was the celebrity guest, the contest has acquired and perpetuated its own peculiar mystique. The idea, company representatives have said, was to sell flour by glamorizing housewives so that working women would head back into their kitchens after World War II and get busy on the grocery front.

The message however was, and remains, more resonant than that. To be a Bake-Off winner is to personify an American institution, a particular--if disappearing--way of life. Never mind that in recent years, contestants have ranged from Harvard-educated historians to software engineers, with housewives a clear minority. The Bake-Off is about homemaking, even if just for a day: “Being at the Bake-Off validates me as a cook and a mother,” one winner--a Denver lawyer--gushed in 1994.

The reality of the contest, however, is something else again. Part kitsch, part chemistry, part king-sized publicity stunt, it has become not only a tried-and-true marketing gimmick for its sponsors but a zenith for an entire subculture of competitive cooks.

“Cooking contests are big business,” said Joyce Campagna, editor of the South Carolina-based Cooking Contest Newsletter, one of three national publications devoted to cook-offs. “And the Bake-Off is the queen bee of cooking contests, that’s for sure.”

Bake-Off pageantry, by comparison to other cooking contests, has always been extravagant. Even in the early years winners took home a $25,000 grand prize. By the last Bake-Off (they’ve been held biennially since the late 1970s), the grand prize had risen to $50,000, plus a $10,000 kitchen make-over, courtesy of contest co-sponsor Sears. There also were smaller prizes for various categories.

The cash prizes generate “tens of thousands” of original recipes for each Bake-Off, according to officials at Pillsbury’s Minneapolis headquarters. They refuse to divulge more specific statistics for the event. The entries--which must each use a product made by Pillsbury or a subsidiary--are evaluated by teams of home economists according to criteria such as flavor, originality and ease of preparation, and finally winnowed to 100 finalists.

This, traditionally, is where the ceremony begins. Finalists are notified by telephone several weeks before the Bake-Off. Reams of preparatory material begin to clog their mailboxes, urging them, among other things, not to discuss their recipes before contest day, lest the judges learn which entry belongs to whom. A list of tips on dealing with the media cautions finalists to “remember nothing is off the record,” and to always call it the Pillsbury Bake-Off in interviews.

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California routinely sends a bloc to the finals, either because it is such a populous state or, as less charitable observers have postulated, because of its cultural knack for turning leisure activities into competitive work. In any case, this year there are 14 California finalists, the most from any state.

They range in experience from Chan, a 51-year-old Bay Area homemaker with three scrapbooks full of cooking contest memorabilia, to Greta Eberhardt, a 31-year-old San Pedro paralegal who lives with a cat named Smokey and who has never entered a cooking contest in her life. She was clipping coupons from the Sunday paper when she saw the entry form, she said, and was unable to resist a shot at financial security.

Every finalist has a story. The locals offer as representative a cross-section as any group: Jeanne Walker is the wife of an Oxnard trucker who has hung her hopes on the Bake-Off since being laid off from her job at a trophy shop late last year. Roger Lee of Lytle Creek designs molds for plastics and has been entering for 15 years, since his daughter won $15,000 for “an Italian biscuit something-or-other” at 16.

Shirley Coderre is a retired aerospace secretary from Irvine who for decades was one of those people who always brings the best desserts to the office potluck. Porter of Carpinteria is a vegetarian and swimmer whose family owns a Ventura County inn and who invents recipes while she does her laps. Linda Greeson, a Spring Valley housewife, got into competitive cooking at the fair in Del Mar, and plans to take her 76-year-old mother with her to Dallas. (They’ll be the ones in the matching country-Western vests.)

There’s Patricia Lapiezo, Mary Lou Cook and Arlene Schlotter, all from San Diego County, all Bake-Off veterans--and all bracing for a standoff with the nationally notorious Chan. And then there’s Eberhardt, the rookie, who is beginning to wonder whether she isn’t in over her head.

These and 91 others will be flown on Feb. 24 to the Bake-Off, where they will be wined, dined, lectured on the superiority of Pillsbury products and pestered by the media for four hoopla-filled days. On the morning of the third day an orchestra will strike up a peppy tune (usually it’s “When the Saints Go Marching In”) and they will file two-by-two into a roomful of Sears kitchenettes.

There, over six hours, they will cook three batches of their recipes--one for the judges, one for the photographers and one for onlookers to taste. Meanwhile in a judging room equipped with plastic spit buckets, a panel of food writers, home economists and other culinary experts (including The Times’ food editor) will do a blind taste test and rate each dish.

What concoction of frozen pie crust and brownie mix and the like will be deemed worth $1 million? Even veterans are stumped. Goopy desserts have traditionally been the favorite, they note, but the push this year is for quick one-dish meals. And then there’s the fact that since the last Bake-Off, Pillsbury has acquired the Progresso and Old El Paso labels, making those products eligible.

“It’s like when they acquired Green Giant--the winner that year was a main dish with some Green Giant stuff,” said Lee, 59, who also has a sister who has been a finalist. “Everybody thought it was a political move.” His own entry is a dessert, as is that of his daughter, who now lives in Kansas and also made the finals this year.

Beyond the politics, however, there is the hoke, which is legendary. One year, the invocation was capped with the line “. . . and God bless the Pillsbury Doughboy.” Members of the Pillsbury family preside over the festivities as if the company was still family-owned, not a subsidiary of a British conglomerate, Grand Metropolitan PLC. When the winners are announced--on national TV--a celebrity emcee lifts the silver dome from a covered serving platter to unveil the grand-prize dish--voila!

Corporate corn aside, the Bake-Off has some value to Pillsbury. For one thing, company officials say, it all but pays for itself in free publicity. One survey found that 80% of American consumers had heard of it. It even made David Letterman’s show one year, in a Top 10 list of “Ways to Make the Pillsbury Bake-Off More Exciting.”

(Suggestions included “Oven mitts full of angry hornets,” “Allow steroids” and “President Clinton can attack at any time and try to eat your entry before the judges see it.”)

Moreover, the company gets 100 new recipes, which are published with unrivaled speed and thoroughness in newspapers, magazines and checkout-counter cookbooks after each Bake-Off. Those recipes--the Orange Kiss-Me Cakes and Hungry Boy Casseroles and Quick ‘N Chewy Crescent Bars and Fudgy Bonbons--in turn, generate demand for Pillsbury products and, the company believes, public goodwill.

“Ordinary people can get here,” the 1994 winner, a North Carolina housewife, marveled to reporters after picking up the grand prize for fudge cookies that she had concocted for a church retreat. “Even from North Carolina. Even with an accent.”

For years, however, contestants have privately grumbled that the Bake-Off, like many cooking competitions, has been overrun with semiprofessionals, some of whom have become so adept at winning prizes that they have been able to turn “contesting,” as they call it, into a second career.

“There are people who do nothing but enter these cook-offs,” said Jann Dickerson, a publicist at Ketchum Public Relations in San Francisco. She has been involved in past years with the National Beef Cook-Off, considered one of the nation’s top three home cooking events. (The third is the National Chicken Cooking Contest.)

“They love to cook and they love the publicity and they just make a life out of it,” Dickerson said. “It’s like a fever that they get.”

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The list of this year’s finalists is peppered with contesters. Maryland’s delegation is dominated by an informal cooking club that meets at the home of a senior health analyst in suburban Washington, hosting tastings and compiling statistical analyses of winning recipes. A New Jersey finalist has won everything from the $10,000-to-your-favorite-charity grand prize in the Newman’s Own/Good Housekeeping recipe contest to top billing in a competition sponsored by Carolina Rice.

And of course, there is Chan, the wife of an Albany, Calif., biochemist, mother of an 8-year-old son and a contester’s contester for 12 years.

“Well, let’s see,” mused Chan, who got hooked on her hobby after winning honorable mention in a Better Homes and Gardens contest for a recipe for turkey slices with oyster sauce.

“I’ve won a Renault sedan, trips to Germany, Spain, Italy and France, a Caribbean cruise, a trip to the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego, a trip to an Arizona resort, a trip to Portland, a trip to New Zealand, a dishwasher, an oven, a refrigerator, six food processors, six microwaves, three sets of Calphalon pans, lots of dishes, several shelves of cookbooks, more than $26,000 in money, a bunch of food certificates, five watches, I don’t know how many T-shirts and sweatshirts--gosh, you name it.”

In fact, she says, she has won almost everything but a trip to the Bake-Off, even though she has sent scores of entries. This year, she sent Pillsbury 24 recipes and they kicked back all but the simplest one, a side dish. She believes her bad luck may have had something to do with her Californian preference for fresh ingredients: “I don’t normally cook with processed products,” she said.

The specter of going mitt-to-mitt with such semiprofessionals is daunting to novices such as Eberhardt, who said she had no idea what she was getting into when she made up the main dish recipe that she mailed in.

“Oh, God,” she said, laughing and petting her cat in the doorway of her minuscule apartment. “I am going to be soooo out of place.”

Lynda Kamps, publicity coordinator for Pillsbury, said that before the rules were changed in 1980, some contestants had returned to the finals as many as seven times. Current rules prohibit anyone from being a finalist more than three times or a grand prize winner more than once.

Nonetheless, at the last Bake-Off, nearly half of the finalists had been there before, and a quarter of this year’s finalists are repeaters.

Kamps said the big prize was partly intended to attract novices such as Eberhardt. But the main aim, she said, “was basically to inspire consumers to share their best original recipes to solve today’s cooking challenges.”

That being the company line, however, most in the cooking and contest worlds believe there were other motives at work. One theory was that this was going to be the last Bake-Off--a persistent rumor that Pillsbury denies. Another--also denied--was that a competing contest was planning to offer $1 million and Pillsbury wanted to head it off.

“My guess is, it’s just a way to garner a lot more attention,” said Al Wester, director of operations for Ventura Associates, a New York sales promotion agency that specializes in sweepstakes and contests. “Sure, the Pillsbury Bake-Off has been out there a long time, but a lot of companies have raised their prize structures” in recent years.

Meanwhile, as Bake-Off day draws near, 100 cooks are out there trying feverishly to apply a watched-pot mentality to the notion of winning all that dough.

“It’s like a meal,” postulated Greeson as she scurried around her Spring Valley home, sewing a new Dallas wardrobe for herself and her elderly mom. “The fun of participating is the main dish of the thing. And the money--that’s just the cooked carrots on the plate.”