Cookoff: Recipe Fever in America by Sutherland Amy

Author:Sutherland, Amy [Sutherland, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2004-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

After extracting myself from the Coors drinkers on Friday, I make a quick tour of the Behind the Store cookoff as the sun sets. Texas and American flags flap in a rising wind. The smell of propane and strains of country music drift over the makeshift campground that fans out over a bald, scrabbly hill. On a stage at the bottom of the hill, a dozen or so judges, most with leathery tans and bloodshot eyes, gather to solemnly evaluate milky green margaritas. I stop to talk to a smirking cook whose thinning hair is pulled into a ponytail—the one having the bad pee year. He’s a housing inspector in Dallas or, as he puts it, “I prevent trailer trash.” He extols the Tolbert cookoff at length to me, ending by waving a hand like a tour guide at the tight ring of crests to the east. “This is our view. This is the fucking Chisos Mountains,” he says. “You can quote me.”

We head down the road in the dark to the CASI cookoff, which by comparison is like driving into a vast refugee resettlement. There are roads winding around every which way, all lined with every kind of tent, camper, and RV. We actually get lost in what is called Crazy Flats. This is where the cookoff spectators are allowed to set up camp, far away from the competition area. In our car’s headlights we catch glimpses of partying around campfires and poses of shirtless, souped-up young men marching through the dark barking, “Show us your tits,” at any passing female. Finally we make our way to the stage where a band has just started playing a kind of Texas swing. There are a lot of men standing around watching the partner dancing because there are about ten of them to every lone woman. The cooks break down to a natural fifty-fifty split of men to women, but the gender scale tips heavily to men among the spectators. A skinny college-age fellow pushes his friend into me and orders, “Ask her.” I move close to my husband. Regardless, a tall man nearer my age steps close to me, crashing my personal space, and says, “You wanna dance?” I shout over the music that I don’t know how to two-step, which is like saying I have a third leg. This scares him off. My husband asks me, “What did that guy say to you?” while nearby a lanky, pale-skinned blonde pulls apart her glow-in-the-dark choker and flings the shiny green liquid over her friends and innocent bystanders as she laughs uncontrollably. When the singer on stage asks rhetorically over the mike, “You know when you have a relationship that is going really well?” a tight huddle of bikers shout in unison, “No-oh.” Revelers wander away from the concert, with red devil horns atop their heads, flashing in the deep desert night.

We hightail it out of the CASI cookoff with a good idea of where the night is headed there. We

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