“Mac-and-cheese got away from us,” sighed Rhonda Hitch, who oversees cooking contests for the Georgia National Fair, which just wrapped up its annual run in Perry. On its second-to-last day, Hitch was accepting entries for the banana pudding contest, and checking in custards packaged in everything from scalloped casserole dishes to striped-stem wine glasses.
At the Georgia National Fair, contestants are given substantial leeway to interpret culinary themes. Banana pudding makers, for instance, were instructed only to “bring [your] best banana pudding—any flavor or style—that includes real bananas.” With roughly 20 percent of each dish’s score devoted to originality, entrants are incentivized to get reckless in the kitchen.
In the case of mac-and-cheese, though, competing cooks’ audacity backfired.
“Some of the judges were like, ‘I wasn’t sure what I was eating’,” Hitch said.
Ill-advised detours aside, prize money-seeking home cooks—some of whom during the fair participate in upward of two dozen cookoffs—are taking traditional recipes in promising and spirited directions. The only problem is there aren’t too many people around to witness it: Fair food enthusiasm has shifted entirely to fried novelties on the midway, with media attention focused almost exclusively on freaky combinations of pork belly, sugar, and crushed convenience store snacks.
“WALB doesn’t even come in here,” Wendy Rowe harrumphed, waving toward the front doors of the Miller Murphy Howard Building, where quilters, wood turners, soap carvers, and camellia growers exhibit their best work.
Rowe was waiting to submit a banana bread pudding that she’d “literally spent the whole year” developing. Judges of the 2024 contest told Rowe that her chocolate peanut butter banana pudding didn’t have sufficient banana flavor, feedback that the native Michigander chalked up to her banana pudding arriviste status. This time around, she decided to slay them with Southernness by fusing the featured dessert with bread pudding.
After testing the recipe on coworkers at the hotel where she mans the front desk—as well as her husband, who grew up in Georgia—Rowe felt confident. She’d already placed 16 times at this year’s fair.
“These ladies are getting tired,” Hitch said of the diehards who each day battle traffic on Interstate 75 to deliver their entries. Among them is Katie Thornton, who was tempted to sit out the pudding contest.
“But they were made, and they were in the fridge, and was like, ‘I do not need two huge banana puddings in my house’,” Thornton said of her pair of puddings, a trifle-style banana split banana pudding layered with pineapple, peanuts, and chocolate sauce, and what she titled Easy Kahlua Banana Pudding, a mashup of cream cheese, bananas, milk, strong coffee, ladyfingers, and liqueur.
“I made that one up last night because I had extra stuff,” Thornton said, admitting she’d never tasted it.
By the close of the hourlong submission period, there were nine entries on the table. But only two of the three invited judges had arrived, so Hitch kindly invited me to join the crew. In a pre-judging meeting, Hitch reminded us not to talk amongst ourselves while scoring, and not to respond if contestants asked what we thought of their entries. “They’re going to get mad and maybe not show up tomorrow,” she warned.
While we kept quiet while sampling, I traded opinions with my fellow judges once we’d handed in our score sheets. As anticipated, plenty of the desserts—which were so varied that a spectator would struggle to guess their common denominator—had no discernable banana flavor. Still, there were several standouts in the field, which Hitch deemed overall more impressive than what the State Banana Pudding Festival of Georgia produced back in April.
Lisa Deal, who started entering cooking contests when she was 10, reserved her highest appreciation for replicable desserts with bold notes: She raved about a salted caramel banana pudding crowned with whipped cream. Chris Mayo, a caterer, was taken with a more traditional pudding bundled in puff pastry, since she could imagine distributing the handheld sweet at weddings.
Probably because of my restaurant background, I was partial to the rum-enhanced bananas foster riff in wine glasses, which seemed like an easy sell, and a delicious demonstration of the decadence essential to banana pudding. It finished second; a deconstructed banana pudding took third. (Hitch later told me their makers are engaged to be married, a decision presumably made before the contest.)
As for first place, it went to Thornton’s thrown-together Kahlua creation. It doesn’t get easier than that.
I can’t believe I read this. I don’t even like the idea of banana pudding. But it was good reading.