Maryland Woman Relishes Pickling Prizes

For four days, Betsy Hedeman hovered over tiny green cucumbers bobbing in a pot on her stove and stirred in vinegar and sugar and spices. She knew just when to cook them and when to let them steep, guiding them over the threshold from vegetable to pickle.

“You have to cook it for days, pouring it off, adding more vinegar, getting the syrup thicker,” said Hedeman, 74. “I love it, but it’s a four-day pickle and it’s a pain in the tush.”

But one with its own rewards.

After she finished the last half-pint jar of sweet cucumber pickles, Hedeman did what few people ever consider these days. She took the jar from her kitchen in a rapidly developing community between Washington and Baltimore and drove it to the state fair in Timonium.

And when the 117th Maryland State Fair ended, Hedeman took with her a blue ribbon, a $3.50 cash prize and a rare satisfaction in today’s takeout world.

“I don’t enter them to win the money,” said Hedeman, a retired secretary who also won a blue ribbon for her pickled pattypan squash and a third-place ribbon for her cherry pie. “I enter for the challenge, just to see if I can do it.”

For 42 years, she has been cooking for the state fair. That makes Hedeman one of the few longtime regulars, said Anna Troyer, who supervises the home arts section at the fair. Troyer said she does not know whether Hedeman is the longest-running contestant.

This year’s fair attracted about 5,000 entries in home arts, Troyer said. The canned-goods division, with more than 130 categories, had about 100 more entries this year than last, she said. “These things are sort of cyclical,” Troyer said. “Right now, people seem interested in doing things that have that country flavor--canning and rug hooking.”

Dorothy Ludwig, a pickle judge, said a prizewinning pickle is made from a firm, young vegetable in a clear liquid that has no single overpowering spice or odor. “I do not like a mushy pickle,” Ludwig said.

The Maryland State Fair has 40 pickling and relish categories, with no single pickling champion.

In a storage room in Hedeman’s basement, three bookshelves are filled with jars. Pint jars of pickled purple beets. Quart jars of bright red tomatoes. Half-pint jars of tiny green cucumbers floating in brine. Atop the bookshelves is a stack of ribbons--for canning, baking, quilting and needlework.

“Well, there was that chocolate thing--a chocolate mousse--and then there was the Great Seafood Search and, jeez, I can’t remember them all,” she said, green eyes squinting behind her glasses. “Won a trip to New York once, gave that away.”

“Cooking is an art,” said Hedeman, who cobbles her own recipes after reading food magazines and cookbooks. “You can have 10 people following a recipe and you will get eight different versions.”

Hedeman’s state fair career began in 1956, when she entered clothes she had made for her two daughters. Once Hedeman and her husband, Bill, moved to a house with some land, they grew a garden and started entering fresh vegetables, then canned vegetables and fruits at the state fair. She shuns county fairs. “There’s more prestige to the state fair,” she said.

Hedeman came up with the pattypan squash after spotting a jar of the miniature, scallop-shaped squash in a grocery in Provence. “When I saw those little squash pickled over there in France, I thought they were just darlin’ and I called Bill over and I said, ‘Look at these things, can we grow them at home?’ ”

Hedeman already has a goal for next year’s state fair: a ribbon for her bread-and-butter pickles.

“I’ve been entering my bread-and-butter pickles for 20 years, and I cannot win,” she said. “This year I tried to make it different. I added fresh ginger, thinking it would give it a twang, but that didn’t do it. I’ll have to come up with something for next year.”