Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Ruffles | Gourmet Makes | Bon Appétit Images
Join Claire Saffitz in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen as she attempts to make gourmet Ruffles.
Ruffles became a fixture of the Iowa State Fair in 1949, a year after they first became available to consumers. For almost two decades, The Ruffle Stacking Competition was the fair’s biggest attraction, drawing competitors and spectators alike from every corner of the country. This story is about the Ruffle Stacking Competition of 1966, which just so happened to be the very last Ruffle Stacking Competition. This story is a tall tale but also exactly how it happened.
But first, how does a Ruffle Stacking Competition work? It’s very simple, actually. Ruffles, so named for their ridges, come in all shapes and sizes and can be stacked upon each other, ridge in ridge. In a Ruffle Stacking Competition, the contestant who can stack the most ruffles before the stack topples wins. Contestants cannot bring their own Ruffles. There is no time limit. Simple.
The all-time record going into the 1966 competition was sixty seven. This year there would be eight contestants, seven of whom were veteran stackers. The eighth was a twelve-year-old who had never stacked a Ruffle in her life. The eighth’s name was Sarah Lodge.
Sarah entered into the competition solely for the one thousand dollar cash prize. Her father had passed some years earlier, leaving their dairy farm to be tended by Sarah and her mother. But in May of 1966, Sarah’s mother took ill and the farm fell into decline. Her mother, now bedridden, needed medication they could scarcely afford, so Sarah entered the Ruffle Stacking Competition.
August 27th, 1966 was the perfect day for stacking Ruffs. The veteran stackers were already waiting behind the curtain when Sarah arrived at nine in the morning. They wore things like protective goggles and custom Ruffle stacking gloves, whereas she wore what she wore every day: overalls and her dusty Chuck Taylors. She could hear the hooting and stomping get louder and louder as the audience grew impatient. Finally, the contestants took the stage and the applause exploded, like that first bite of fried butter on a stick that sends butter shooting out in all directions.
Sarah was nervous, but she had one thing guiding her hands that the career stackers didn’t have: love. She was doing this for her mom. The shot of the starting pistol rang out and the competition began. The veterans were already on the tenth and fifteenth Ruffles in their stacks by the time Sarah added her third. By the time the first veteran’s stack fell (at twenty three) Sarah had finally reached eleven chips. One bye one, the experienced stackers’ towers toppled over. And finally, by the time her final competitor’s stack fell (at fifty four) Sarah’s stack stood at thirty one. The crowd didn’t know what to do but sit and watch what promised to be a dull show.
But then Sarah’s stack reached sixty seven Ruffles. The record. The crowd was in it. Perched on the tips of her toes, Sarah added the sixty eighth chip and a palpable shockwave of awe ran through the crowd. She had, in fact, won the competition over an hour and a half ago, but something compelled her to keep going. At first a chair was brought in for her to stand on, then a ladder. Then an even bigger ladder. The crowd was so quiet you could have heard a ladybug sneeze by the time Sarah stacked her two hundred and twentieth Ruffle. As she reached the top rung of the ladder (four hundred and thirty six Ruffles), event crews rushed around her to cut a whole in the top of the tent so she could continue to add to her stack. Five hundred. Six hundred.
More than twenty five hours in, Sarah stood on a stack of three ladders next to her stack of nine hundred and ninety nine Ruffles. She looked away from her work and off into the distance. There was her house, a mere ten miles away, with her mom in it. She looked back at her stack, placed her one thousandth Ruffle to the top and then made her way down. At the bottom of the ladder, the crowd watched her silently. Some man in a suit gave her a check for one thousand dollars. Sarah went home.
Next year, the Ruffle Stacking Competition would be replaced by the Pringle Stacking Competition, and it just wasn’t the same.
Check out Claire's Instagram: instagram.com/csaffitz/
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Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Ruffles | Gourmet Makes | Bon Appétit