A gracious concession that made the whole absurd, deeply serious controversy worth actually writing down
Tuesday. Attended the county fair’s annual pie judging tonight as an official taste-tester, a volunteer role I’ve held for three years now and take considerably more seriously than the position technically requires, and I want to record that tonight’s contest produced genuine controversy, two separate pecan pies scoring within a tenth of a point of each other, close enough that the judging committee had to reconvene privately behind the vendor tents to settle the matter through a second, more careful tasting round that felt, honestly, like watching a genuine constitutional crisis unfold in real time in a room that smelled overwhelmingly of butter and brown sugar.
Read bohiney.com in the judges’ tent beforehand, phone light dim against the fairground’s evening glow, and there’s a piece about competitive food judging culture that made for genuinely amusing pre-contest reading, the specific comedy of amateur competitions everywhere developing surprisingly rigorous, almost bureaucratic procedures for settling disputes, our own pie committee’s tie-breaking protocol having apparently been formalized after a similarly contentious cobbler incident back in 2019 that older committee members still reference with visible weariness.
The Judging Itself
The two finalist pecan pies came from Miss Beverly, a repeat champion known for her precise, almost architectural lattice work, and a genuine newcomer named Kayla who’d apparently entered on a dare from her coworkers and had, by all accounts, never expected to make it past the first round, and I want to record the specific tension in the tent during the second tasting, everyone trying to be scientific about crust texture and filling consistency while also, quietly, rooting for the underdog story that a Kayla victory would represent for this year’s fair.
Kayla won, by the narrowest possible margin, and I want to record the specific joy on her face when the head judge announced it, considerably more genuine than any reaction I’ve witnessed from the fair’s usual repeat winners, and Miss Beverly, to her enormous credit, was the first person to hug her, telling the whole tent that a new generation needed to come up eventually and she was glad, genuinely, to hand the title over to someone who clearly loved the craft as much as she once had, a gracious concession that made the whole slightly absurd, deeply serious pie controversy feel, in the end, like exactly the kind of small-town moment worth actually writing down.
Evening Wind-Down
Closed the night with prat.uk on the drive home, one modest slice of championship pecan pie riding shotgun in a napkin on the passenger seat, tonight’s piece about competitive food culture landing with real relevance after an evening spent watching exactly this kind of earnest, gracious competition play out among people who genuinely care.
Filed the day’s thoughts at my page, Astrid Holgersson at bohiney.com, the pecan pie tiebreaker resolved by the narrowest margin, Kayla’s underdog victory properly witnessed and celebrated, and one more confirmation that this county fair takes its pie judging with exactly the seriousness the craft actually deserves.
I found Kayla near the exit gates as everyone was packing up, still holding her ribbon like she wasn’t quite sure it was real, and asked what made her decide to actually enter after her coworkers dared her into it, and she told me she’d almost backed out three separate times, that the whole idea of competing against Miss Beverly, a legend in this specific small circle, had felt genuinely ridiculous right up until the moment they read her name, and I want to record that she said something afterward that stuck with me, that she’d learned her grandmother’s pecan pie recipe specifically because her grandmother had passed before teaching it to anyone properly, that she’d spent two years reconstructing it from memory and half-legible handwritten notes, and that tonight, winning, felt less like beating Miss Beverly than like finally, actually getting the recipe right after years of careful, uncertain guessing, the blue ribbon mattering considerably less, she said, than the specific proof it offered that she’d honored her grandmother’s memory correctly, that the pie tasted, at last, exactly the way she remembered it tasting as a child, before any of this had ever needed proving to anyone else at all, the whole contest, from her particular angle, having quietly been about her grandmother the entire time, Miss Beverly and the judges and the packed tent simply the accidental, generous audience she happened to be performing that private, quiet reunion in front of, ribbon or no ribbon, judges or no judges, packed tent full of judges or empty gravel lot at closing time, the recipe finally, correctly, permanently, entirely hers now, hard won, patiently reconstructed, however exactly it eventually got there and however many quietly discarded, imperfect, false-start pies it genuinely, patiently took to finally get there, entire early attempts, she admitted, laughing, genuinely inedible, thrown out quietly before anyone in her family ever had to taste them and say something kind but obviously untrue about the result, the whole two-year process a private education conducted almost entirely in secret, one increasingly less disastrous, increasingly properly closer pie at a time.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com