The rain gear was a precaution for the showers forecast over an October weekend on the Delmarva Peninsula, where the Sullivan family was hosting its 25th annual pasty cook-off at a private campground. The sticky note was a prognostication and a taunt to the 16 other competitors in this year's contest. Written on the sticky was a single word: winner.
"Okay, you can stop all entries," Sullivan announced to no one in particular. "The winner is here."
The braggadocio was more WWE theatrics than true inflammatory talk, just another Sullivan ritual, part of the giant gathering around this little pocket of stuffed dough. But for Sullivan, the swagger was also subterfuge — to deflect attention from the fact she had never before made the family's time-honored pasty, a hand pie filled with beef, potatoes and onions.
Privately, to a stranger, Sullivan made her rookie confession. It was tinged with a kind of outsider's guilt: She had joined the family when she and Greg, the youngest of 10 children born to Jerry and Myrtle Sullivan, tied the knot 27 years ago. She had never been as committed to the pasty as her husband and his brood, who were raised to revere the snack. Besides, she said, "they're a pain in the a-- to make."
But make them she did this year, mostly as a gift to Greg, whose 56th birthday fell just days before the family cook-off. The pasties turned out well enough that Andrea decided to make another batch for the competition. She admitted that her ingredients deviated from the family's hallowed recipe, the one all contestants are supposed to follow or risk rejection by a trio of judges trained to spot pasty impostors.
From the playful tone around the kitchen table, where a few family members were cataloging the 17 pasties for the judges, Andrea's entry appeared headed toward Sullivan cook-off lore. In contests to come, it might be mentioned in the same breath as other experiments — or outright jokes, like the mushroom-and-cheese pasty or the frozen pasty from Giant that someone entered one year.
"I feared, 'Oh, my God, what if that wins?'" remembered Roberta Schwartz, one of the 10 siblings. Then Schwartz paused for a second to consider this year's competition.
"Or what if somebody like Andrea [won] for the first time?"
Jerry Sullivan, the 86-year-old patriarch, is frequently accused of having launched the cook-off in 1990 because he wasn't getting his share of dough. The 10 children he and Myrtle had produced over a 10-year span — including two sets of twins — had all left the nest, and Jerry had retired from the Naval Sea Systems Command in 1983 after a distinguished career. There was little motivation for Myrtle to bake pasties for just the two of them.
Jerry won't argue with the accusation. But he notes wryly that reuniting the family once a year isn't a bad motivation, either.
The pasty has been central to Jerry's life since he was a small boy in Butte, Mont., where he was born and lived briefly before his family moved to California. Tin miners from Cornwall were thought to have brought the pasty, their traditional lunchtime fare, to upper Michigan, Montana and other U.S. states when the mining business went bust in England in the latter part of the 19th century. Jerry's mother earned cash baking pasties for hungry Montana miners, who would eat the pies deep below the Earth's surface.
"They had a little fire there, and they'd warm them up," Jerry says.
Back then, a thick outer crust was paramount to a proper pasty. Miners, their hands blackened with dirt, needed the pastry handle so they could eat the rest of the meat pie and discard the grimy crust. The fillings often reflected their poor, hardscrabble lives: Root vegetables such as carrots, onions and rutabagas were mixed with occasional scraps of meat. Some argue the pasty (pronounced PASS-tee) got its name because it was built from the leftovers of past meals.
The pasty of Jerry's youth was certainly unfussy. Its filling contained beef, potatoes, onions, butter, salt and pepper; its dough mixed together flour, water, salt and lard or suet. That was, essentially, the recipe that Jerry's mother passed on to Myrtle, who became the custodian of the Sullivan pasty. Over time, Myrtle made small tweaks, such as substituting Crisco for the animal fat and thinning out the crust. She says her husband preferred the alterations.
"He says, 'I got to tell you, yours are better than my mother's,' " Myrtle recalls while demonstrating her technique at a kitchen counter, a pair of rolling pin earrings hanging from her lobes.
"I don't remember that," chimes in Jerry from a nearby table.
Myrtle's recipe now stands as the ideal by which all Sullivan family pasties are judged. What's more, for many years, both Jerry and Myrtle served as two of the three judges. (Their son Patrick eventually joined them to break ties.) What it meant was that, if you wanted to win the Sullivan family cook-off, you had to prepare these delicious-but-no-frills pasties just the way Jerry and Myrtle liked them. Neither luxury ingredients nor creativity would be rewarded.
Linda Bock, one of two Sullivan girls born on the same day in 1950, took home the first grand-champion rolling pin at that debut cook-off, a rather loose and carefree contest compared with the ones today, which take months to organize. Bock has since won four other grand-champion pins (and numerous "super chef" rolling pins, awarded to a pair of runners-up), including the top prize last year.
Over the 25 years that Jerry and Myrtle have hosted the cook-off, the weekend gathering has grown in both size and stature. Many drive to the site from the Washington area, while others have made the trip from as far away as California or even Japan. The event has become so popular that, several years ago, a number of grandchildren banded together and bought an adjacent property to provide more land for visiting Sullivans and friends to pitch their tents and park their cars.
This past Columbus Day, with more than 130 people jammed onto the property, the campground looked more like a Woodstock reunion. Tents dotted the soggy ground surrounding the main house. A fire pit was circled with chairs, where family members in 25th-anniversary T-shirts talked, drank beer or warmed up their pasties in the smoldering embers. A small ensemble plucked at their instruments nearby. Others sat at picnic tables under a large, V-shaped tent, swapping stories or admiring the display of grand-champion rolling pins, several of them meticulously painted by granddaughter Kim Jensen.
The smack talk could get thick and heavy in the hours leading to the cook-off. When an outsider learned that granddaughter Aliceia Anderson had already won four grand-champion pins (still lagging behind her mother, Kathleen McDonald, who has seven), Bock offered an unsolicited explanation for Anderson's success.
"I think Aliceia won several times in a row because my parents probably had surgery and their taste buds were affected by the anesthesia, so they hadn't recovered fully to taste my pasty and appreciate it as the grand winner," Bock teased.
For the silver anniversary cook-off, Bock served as a judge and, according to the rules, could not enter her pasties. Her fellow judges included her twin sister, Rita Jensen, and brother Patrick. A few years ago, Jerry and Myrtle decided to step down as judges, a concession to dietary restrictions and a proactive move to train the next generation of adjudicators. The couple also wanted to rotate a few persistent winners into a judge's chair to allow other family members a chance to claim their own rolling pins.
The judges approached the blind tasting with a deadly seriousness, evaluating each of the 17 entries for appearance, crust, seasoning and other factors. They were careful to hide their scorecards from peering eyes.
In the final evaluation, the judges picked No. 17 as their grand champion, although Patrick had reservations. He called it "unique," by which he meant that No. 17 had strayed from Myrtle's flavor profiles. The other judges disagreed.
Jerry first announced the runners-up: Ronnie Schools and Liz Smith. Schools, husband of granddaughter Erin, had never previously entered a pasty and wouldn't reveal his secrets. Smith, the daughter of Rita Jensen, broke down and cried when she won her first rolling pin ever. Smith said she followed Myrtle's filling recipe precisely. And what about the crust?
Apparently Smith leaned on Aunt Linda's secret recipe for the dough, which Bock had nicked from "Joy of Cooking." It included a small amount of white vinegar.
The grand champion's recipe wandered even further from tradition: Andrea Sullivan, the woman who had never previously made a pasty, had added olive oil, dried basil and fresh minced garlic to Myrtle's traditional filling. That was the "unique" flavor that Patrick Sullivan had detected.
Andrea was stunned. "I was very intimidated," she confessed. "I've never made a crust before." Her husband, Greg, was equally shocked. She now had won as many grand champion rolling pins as he.
"I'm 1 for 25, and she's 1 for 1," Greg said. "You're batting a thousand." Then he quickly collected himself and moved back into standard Sullivan form: He issued a taunt.
"But I didn't enter this year."
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