The contesters know differently. Sure, they figure fortune had something to do with it, but they know it's no fluke. Like gamblers, they are well acquainted with the fickleness of Lady Luck. But also like gamblers, they know the game and have played it for all they are worth. In short, they have earned the right to be here. They thoroughly researched past winners, boned up on current chicken trends, foisted innumerable poultry creations on their family and friends, and kept notebooks on their nightstands to scribble drumstick brainstorms in the middle of the night.

Having made the cut for the cookoff, they practiced making their recipes, carefully thought out their presentation, scoped out the competition, and planned what time they would send their dishes to the judges. There is $25,000 at stake. This is National Chicken, after all.

There is no clear-cut annual season to national cooking contests, but there is a recognizable cycle, a kind of Triple Crown, dictated by the three biggest cookoffs, all biennials. It begins in the spring every other year with National Chicken. The National Beef Cook-Off with its $50,000 grand prize and twenty contestants follows in September. Then the Pillsbury competition, by far the biggest with its one hundred contestants and $1 million grand prize, rolls around in February. Once the hysteria of that contest recedes, contesters turn their attention again to poultry and National Chicken. The cycle begins anew.

In between are sundry annual cookoffs, not to mention a slew of national recipe contests such as Colavita's Better Than Butter Recipe with a grand prize of a round-trip for two to Italy. Most contesters fool with the stinking rose for California's Gilroy Garlic Cook-Off in July and then experiment on their backyard grills for Sutter Home's Build a Better Burger Contest in September in Napa Valley. There are plenty of smaller, regional cookoffs as well, such as the National Oyster Cook-off in Maryland, the National Cornbread Cook-off in Tennessee, and the National Dandelion Cook-off in Ohio's Amish country. And new cookoffs pop up here and there. During this cycle that I'm following, several have already appeared on the horizon: the Post Selects Cereal Brunch Contest ($10,000 prize), the Reynolds Hot Bags Foil Bags "In the Bag" Recipe Contest (a round-trip for two to the Caribbean), and The Great Australian Barbeque Cookoff, for which the finalists will be flown to Sydney, Australia, to compete.

National Chicken, as far as anyone knows, is the longest, continually running cookoff, just beating the Pillsbury Bake-Off® contest by months. However, National Chicken got its start as a regional event, and Pillsbury has always been a national one. The first chicken cookoff was held at the annual Delmarva Chicken Festival in Salisbury, Maryland. Delmarva is the squished-up name for the squat peninsula that Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland share between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It is also the birthplace of America's commercial chicken industry. The year was 1949, when chicken was sold as a whole bird that home cooks dismembered in their own kitchen. This was before mandatory federal inspection of chicken, before chicken tenders or boned breasts, before Kentucky Fried Chicken went from coast to coast, before chicken's sound thumping of beef.

That first year the contest was open to all comers. Some 160 local cooks showed up, toting their own frying pans and wrinkled, stained family recipes scribbled on the backs of envelopes. The judging went late into the night. Out of a field of mostly fried chicken the judges made a bold choice: a broiled bird. Broiled Chicken Deluxe, submitted by Mrs. A. L. Keith of Salisbury, a dark-haired woman in a floral apron, called for squeezing lemon juice over a two-and-a-half-pound broiler, dusting it with a mix of salt, paprika, and pepper, smearing it with melted butter, and then finishing it with a sprinkle of sugar. Mrs. Keith won a custom-designed Westinghouse kitchen and $400 in cash toward its installation.

By the 1960s the Delmarva Chicken Cook-off had evolved into a national contest, with a contestant picked from each state and the District of Columbia. Entries were more and more expected to be original. Those early years produced recipes that are still requested, such as Sweet 'n' Smokey Oven Barbecued Chicken, a baked bird cut in parts with a sauce of equal parts catsup, cooking oil, and maple syrup lightened with some vinegar and mustard, and Sweet and Sour Chicken, baked chicken parts slimed with Russian salad dressing, dry onion soup mix, and a jar of apricot preserves. You can still find both recipes on the National Chicken Council's website.

By the early '70s the contest had become more work and money - what with a $10,000 grand prize and fifty-one all-expenses-paid trips - than a regional festival could handle. The cookoff was transferred in 1971 to what was then the National Broiler Council and renamed the National Chicken Cooking Contest. The competition left the Delmarva strip and became a roving event, moving from one poultry-producing state to the next with each contest. It remains the biggest promotion put on by what is now called the National Chicken Council, a national trade and marketing association in Washington, D.C. It also remains the only national cookoff where contestants represent their home states.

Although the National Beef Cook-Off offers a bigger grand prize, National Chicken has long been the big favorite of the contesters for two reasons. First, they love it for the deluxe treatment, which they consider only second to the attentions Pillsbury lavishes on its chosen. Each contestant wins a three-night, all-expenses-paid trip for two wherever the cookoff is held.

Second, National Chicken gives contesters the freedom to flex their gourmet muscles. While most cookoffs require the use of processed foods, all this cookoff calls for is chicken, plain and simple. In fact, recipes that rely heavily on processed foods rarely make it to the finals anymore. The Beef Cook-Off calls only for beef as well but limits the number of ingredients to six, including the meat, and literally holds cooking time to thirty minutes. These restrictions necessitate processed food. At Chicken there is no limit on ingredients. As for time, contestants must cook their dish twice in three hours, which may rule out wrapping up a galantine, but otherwise it is a leisurely, liberating pace. Simplicity does count in the judging, but in equal shares to appeal, appearance, and taste.

Consequently, at National Chicken most contestants actually cook rather than just heat. You find exotica such as peanut oil, coconut milk, fresh basil, shiitake mushrooms, Chinese five-spice powder, and even the hallmark of fine cooking, shallots. Sometimes the freedom goes to the contestants' heads, as with the cultural mishmash of Nuevo Cubano Chicken Kiev with Mango Mustard Sauce or the pantry of ingredients for Barclay's Moroccan Chicken Pie with Sweet Potato Polenta. Mostly the contest produces some genuinely interesting dishes and ideas, such as Roxanne Chan's second place winner in '99 that called for smoking chicken breasts in a wok and then serving them sliced over a sesame vegetable relish. That said, there is one recipe in the 2001 contest from North Dakota that calls for two cups of finely crushed pretzels and uses lemon Jell-O in the glaze.

When the rules for the 2001 contest were issued, the contesters were understandably alarmed at what might seem like an incidental change to an outsider. For the first time cooked chicken, as in rotisserie chicken, could be used. To the contesters this signaled a seismic shift. They feared National Chicken would now go the way of National Beef, that ease of preparation would edge out taste. Rotisserie chickens today, frozen chicken fingers tomorrow.

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© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

Tags: Recipes and Cooking

About the Author

Amy Sutherland is the author of Cookoff and was a features reporter at the Portland Press Herald in Portland, Maine, for seven years. Her articles have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, and Disney Magazine. She has a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. More