The sorrow and the pity

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I haven’t yet recovered my emotional equilibrium after failing to win the cooking contest for best vintage American dish (with an emphasis on suburban-rural classics) at Noelle and Val’s backyard crawfish boil last weekend. Clearly, I had been overconfident. It all started when I noticed a picture on the invitation of last year’s entries. I spotted a legendary dish that I’d read about but never seen: Undescended Twinkies. It’s a dessert casserole of Twinkies cunningly suspended in jello that was created by Jan and Michael Stern for their seminal 1984 ‘Square Meals’ cookbook. (I asked around at this year’s crawfish boil and found two people who remembered the dish. One said it tasted like a Creamsicle; the other remembered an orange baby-aspirin flavor.) With that level of Americana sophistication on the part of the entrants, I figured I’d surely win with something sweet, subtle ... understated.

My entry was a batch of -- well, I guess you could call them cookies. Or butterscotch clusters. They’re made by combining melted butterscotch morsels, canned crisp chow mein noodles and salted peanuts. (I can’t share the recipe here as it would violate Food section policy of publishing only recipes that have been blessed by the Times Test Kitchen, which won’t be sanctioning my butterscotch clusters any time soon.) I found the recipe in ‘Talk About Good,’ a cookbook published in1967 by the Junior League of Lafayette, Louisiana. It took about 10 minutes and I had a couple dozen orangey-beige thingies that were joltingly sweet with the kind of addictive salty crunch that makes chocolate-covered pretzels popular. When I presented them, the crowd went wild. The clusters were consumed in seconds. Fans begged for my recipe. But the judges weren’t impressed.

Instead, the prize went to Chris, whose Tennessee Pride Hash Brown Casserole is from a recipe in his wife Carol’s ‘Duckworth Family Cookbook’ (she’s a Duckworth; they’re from southern Illinois). It calls for sausage, cheddar cheese, canned chicken soup, sour cream, French onion dip, chopped onion, chopped red and green pepper and frozen hash browns. The crowd went wilder.

-- Susan LaTempa