Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (15 page)

I will tell you one more story to the point—though this one is not about me. A year and a half ago, some women from the Los Angeles Self-Help Clinic came to New York to demonstrate do-it-yourself gynecology and performed an abortion onstage using a controversial device called the Karman cannula. Subsequently, the woman on whom the abortion had been performed developed a serious infection and had to go into the hospital for a D and C. One of the reporters covering the story, a feminist, found out about the infection, but she decided not to make the fact public, because she thought that to do so might hurt the self-help movement. When I heard about it, I was appalled; I was more appalled when I realized that I understood why she had done it.

But I cannot excuse that kind of self-censorship, either in that reporter or in myself. I think that many of us in this awkward position worry too much about what the movement will think and how what we write will affect the movement. In fact, the movement is nothing
more than an amorphous blob of individual women and groups, most of whom disagree with each other. In fact, no amount of criticism of the movement will stop its forward momentum. In fact, I am intelligent enough to know that nothing I write really matters in any significant way to any of it. And knowing all this, I worry. I am a writer. I am a feminist. When I manage, from time to time, to overcome my political leanings and get at the truth, I feel a little better. And then I worry some more.

May, 1973

Roxanne Frisbie brought her own pan to the twenty-fourth annual Pillsbury Bake-Off. “I feel like a nut,” she said. “It’s just a plain old dumb pan, but everything I do is in that crazy pan.” As it happens, Mrs. Frisbie had no cause whatsoever to feel like a nut: it seemed that at least half the 100 finalists in the Bake-It-Easy Bake-Off had brought something with them—their own sausages, their own pie pans, their own apples. Edna Buckley, who was fresh from representing New York State at the National Chicken Cooking Contest, where her recipe for fried chicken in a batter of beer, cheese, and crushed pretzels had gone down to defeat, brought with her a lucky handkerchief, a lucky horseshoe, a lucky dime for her shoe, a potholder with the Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy on it, an Our Blessed Lady pin, and all of her jewelry, including a silver charm also in the shape of the doughboy. Mrs. Frisbie and Mrs. Buckley and the other finalists came to the Bake-Off to bake off for $65,000 in cash prizes; in Mrs. Frisbie’s case, this meant making something she created herself and named Butterscotch Crescent Rolls—and which Pillsbury promptly, and to Mrs. Frisbie’s dismay, renamed Sweet ’N Creamy
Crescent Crisps. Almost all the recipes in the finals were renamed by Pillsbury using a lot of crispy snicky snacky words. An exception to this was Sharon Schubert’s Wiki Wiki Coffee Cake, a name which ought to have been snicky snacky enough; but Pillsbury, in a moment of restraint, renamed it One-Step Tropical Fruit Cake. As it turned out, Mrs. Schubert ended up winning $5,000 for her cake, which made everybody pretty mad, even the contestants who had been saying for days that they did not care who won, that winning meant nothing and was quite beside the point; the fact was that Sharon Schubert was a previous Bake-Off winner, having won $10,000 three years before for her Crescent Apple Snacks, and in addition had walked off with a trip to Puerto Vallarta in the course of this year’s festivities. Most of the contestants felt she had won a little more than was really fair. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

The Pillsbury Company has been holding Bake-Offs since 1948, when Eleanor Roosevelt, for reasons that are not clear, came to give the first one her blessing. This year’s took place from Saturday, February 24, through Tuesday, February 27, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. One hundred contestants—97 of them women, 2 twelve-year-old boys, and 1 male graduate student—were winnowed down from a field of almost 100,000 entrants to compete for prizes in five categories: flour, frosting mix, crescent main dish, crescent dessert, and hot-roll mix. They were all brought, or flown, to Los Angeles for the Bake-Off itself, which took place on Monday, and a round of activities that included a tour of Universal Studios, a mini-version of television’s
Let’s Make A Deal
with Monty Hall himself, and a trip to Disneyland. The event is also attended by some 100 food editors, who
turn it from a mere contest into the incredible publicity stunt Pillsbury intends it to be, and spend much of their time talking to each other about sixty-five new ways to use tuna fish and listening to various speakers lecture on the consumer movement and food and the appliance business. General Electric is co-sponsor of the event and donates a stove to each finalist, as well as the stoves for the Bake-Off; this year, it promoted a little Bake-Off of its own for the microwave oven, an appliance we were repeatedly told was the biggest improvement in cooking since the invention of the Willoughby System. Every one of the food editors seemed to know what the Willoughby System was, just as everyone seemed to know what Bundt pans were. “You will all be happy to hear,” we were told at one point, “that only one of the finalists this year used a Bundt pan.” The food editors burst into laughter at that point; I am not sure why. One Miss Alex Allard of San Antonio, Texas, had already won the microwave contest and $5,000, and she spent most of the Bake-Off turning out one Honey Drizzle Cake after another in the microwave ovens that ringed the Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. I never did taste the Honey Drizzle Cake, largely because I suspected—and this was weeks before the
Consumers Union
article on the subject—that microwave ovens were dangerous and probably caused peculiar diseases. If God had wanted us to make bacon in four minutes, He would have made bacon that cooked in four minutes.

“The Bake-Off is America,” a General Electric executive announced just minutes before it began. “It’s family. It’s real people doing real things.” Yes. The Pillsbury Bake-Off is an America that exists less and less, but exists nonetheless. It is women who still live on farms,
who have six and seven children, who enter county fairs and sponsor 4-H Clubs. It is Grace Ferguson of Palm Springs, Florida, who entered the Bake-Off seventeen years in a row before reaching the finals this year, and who cooks at night and prays at the same time. It is Carol Hamilton, who once won a trip on a Greyhound bus to Hollywood for being the most popular girl in Youngstown, Ohio. There was a lot of talk at the Bake-Off about how the Bake-It-Easy theme had attracted a new breed of contestants this year, younger contestants—housewives, yes, but housewives who used whole-wheat flour and Granola and sour cream and similar supposedly hip ingredients in their recipes and were therefore somewhat more sophisticated, or urban, or something-of-the-sort than your usual Bake-Off contestant. There were a few of these—two, to be exact: Barbara Goldstein of New York City and Bonnie Brooks of Salisbury, Maryland, who actually visited the Los Angeles County Art Museum during a free afternoon. But there was also Suzie Sisson of Palatine, Illinois, twenty-five years old and the only Bundt-pan person in the finals, and her sentiments about life were the same as those that Bake-Off finalists presumably have had for years. “These are the beautiful people,” she said, looking around the ballroom as she waited for her Bundt cake to come out of the oven. “They’re not the little tiny rich people. They’re nice and happy and religious types and family-oriented. Everyone talks about women’s lib, which is ridiculous. If you’re nice to your husband, he’ll be nice to you. Your family is your job. They come first.”

I was seven years old when the Pillsbury Bake-Off began, and as I grew up reading the advertisements for it in the women’s magazines that were lying around the
house, it always seemed to me that going to a Bake-Off would be the closest thing to a childhood fantasy of mine, which was to be locked overnight in a bakery. In reality, going to a Bake-Off
is
like being locked overnight in a bakery—a very bad bakery. I almost became sick right there on Range 95 after my sixth carbohydrate-packed sample—which happened, by coincidence, to be a taste of the aforementioned Mrs. Frisbie’s aforementioned Sweet ’N Creamy Crescent Crisps.

But what is interesting about the Bake-Off—what is even significant about the event—is that it is, for the American housewife, what the Miss America contest used to represent to teen-agers. The pinnacle of a certain kind of achievement. The best in field. To win the Pillsbury Bake-Off, even to be merely a finalist in it, is to be a great housewife. And a creative housewife. “Cooking is very creative.” I must have heard that line thirty times as I interviewed the finalists. I don’t happen to think that cooking is very creative—what interests me about it is, on the contrary, its utter mindlessness and mathematical certainty. “Cooking is very relaxing”—that’s my bromide. On the other hand, I have to admit that some of the recipes that were concocted for the Bake-Off, amazing combinations of frosting mix and marshmallows and peanut butter and brown sugar and chocolate, were practically awe-inspiring. And cooking, it is quite clear, is only a small part of the apparently frenzied creativity that flourishes in these women’s homes. I spent quite a bit of time at the Bake-Off chatting with Laura Aspis of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a seven-time Bake-Off finalist and duplicate-bridge player, and after we had discussed her high-protein macaroons made with coconut-almond frosting mix and Granola, I noticed that Mrs. Aspis was
wearing green nail polish. On the theory that no one who wears green nail polish wants it to go unremarked upon, I remarked upon it.

“That’s not green nail polish,” Mrs. Aspis said. “It’s platinum nail polish that I mix with green food coloring.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And the thing of it is,” she went on, “when it chips, it doesn’t matter.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because it stains your nails permanently,” Mrs. Aspis said.

“You mean your nails are permanently green?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Mrs. Aspis. “You see, last week they were blue, and the week before I made purple, so now my nails are a combination of all three. It looks like I’m in the last throes of something.”

On Sunday afternoon, most of the finalists chose to spend their free time sitting around the hotel and socializing. Two of them—Marjorie Johnson of Robbinsdale, Minnesota, and Mary Finnegan of Minneota, Minnesota—were seated at a little round table just off the Hilton ballroom talking about a number of things, including Tupperware. Both of them love Tupperware.

“When I built my new house,” Mrs. Johnson said, “I had so much Tupperware I had to build a cupboard just for it.” Mrs. Johnson is a very tiny, fortyish mother of three, and she and her dentist husband have just moved into a fifteen-room house she cannot seem to stop talking about. “We have this first-floor kitchen, harvest gold and blue, and it’s almost finished. Now I have a second kitchen on my walk-out level and that’s going to be harvest gold and blue, too. Do you know about the new wax
Congoleum? I think that’s what I put in—either that or Shinyl Vinyl. I haven’t had to wash my floors in three months. The house isn’t done yet because of the Bake-Off. My husband says if I’d spent as much time on it as I did on the Bake-Off, we’d be finished. I sent in sixteen recipes—it took me nearly a year to do it.”

“That’s nothing,” said Mrs. Finnegan. “It took me twenty years before I cracked it. I’m a contest nut. I’m a thirty-times winner in the
Better Homes & Gardens
contest. I won a thousand dollars from Fleischmann’s Yeast. I won Jell-O this year, I’m getting a hundred and twenty-five dollars’ worth of Revere cookware for that. The Knox Gelatine contest. I’ve won seven blenders and a quintis-serie. It does four things—fries, bakes, roasts, there’s a griddle. I sold the darn thing before I even used it.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Mrs. Johnson. “Did you enter the Crystal Sugar Name the Lake Home contest?”

“Did I enter?” said Mrs. Finnegan. “Wait till you see this.” She took a pen and wrote her submission on a napkin and held it up for Mrs. Johnson. The napkin read “Our Entry Hall.” “I should have won that one,” said Mrs. Finnegan. “I did win the Crystal Sugar Name the Dessert contest. I called it ‘Signtation Squares.’ I think I got a blender on that one.”

“Okay,” said Mrs. Johnson. “They’ve got a contest now, Crystal Sugar Name a Sauce. It has pineapple in it.”

“I don’t think I won that,” said Mrs. Finnegan, “but I’ll show you what I sent in.” She held up the napkin and this time what she had written made sense. “Hawaiian More Chant,” it said.

“Oh, you’re clever,” said Mrs. Johnson.

“They have three more contests so I haven’t given up,” said Mrs. Finnegan.

• • •

On Monday morning at exactly 9 a.m., the one hundred finalists marched four abreast into the Hilton ballroom, led by Philip Pillsbury, former chairman of the board of the company. The band played “Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven,” and when it finished, Pillsbury announced: “Now you one hundred winners can go to your ranges.”

Chaos. Shrieking. Frenzy. Furious activity. Cracking eggs. Chopping onions. Melting butter. Mixing, beating, blending. The band perking along with such carefully selected tunes as “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake.” Contestants running to the refrigerators for more supplies. Floor assistants rushing dirty dishes off to unseen dishwashers. All two hundred members of the working press, plus television’s Bob Barker, interviewing any finalist they could get to drop a spoon. At 9:34 a.m., Mrs. Lorraine Walmann submitted her Cheesy Crescent Twist-Ups to the judges and became the first finalist to finish. At 10 a.m., all the stoves were on, the television lights were blasting, the temperature in the ballroom was up to the mid-nineties, and Mrs. Marjorie Johnson, in the course of giving an interview about her house to the
Minneapolis Star
, had forgotten whether she had put one cup of sugar or two into her Crispy Apple Bake. “You know, we’re building this new house,” she was saying. “When I go back, I have to buy living-room furniture.” By 11 a.m., Mae Wilkinson had burned her skillet corn bread and was at work on a second. Laura Aspis had lost her potholder. Barbara Bellhorn was distraught because she was not used to California apples. Alex Allard was turning out yet another Honey
Drizzle Cake. Dough and flour were all over the floor. Mary Finnegan was fussing because the crumbs on her Lemon Cream Bars were too coarse. Marjorie Johnson was in the midst of yet another interview on her house. “Well, let me tell you,” she was saying, “the shelves in the kitchen are built low.…” One by one, the contestants, who were each given seven hours and four tries to produce two perfect samples of their recipes, began to finish up and deliver one tray to the judges and one tray to the photographer. There were samples everywhere, try this, try that, but after six tries, climaxed by Mrs. Frisbie’s creation, I stopped sampling. The overkill was unbearable: none of the recipes seemed to contain one cup of sugar when two would do, or a delicate cheese when Kraft American would do, or an actual minced onion when instant minced onions would do. It was snack time. It was convenience-food time. It was less-work-for-Mother time. All I could think about was a steak.