Before the Bake Off Was Great and British, It Was Pillsbury
Nora Ephron described the Pillsbury Bake-Off in a 1973 essay for Esquire as “like being locked overnight in a bakery—a very bad bakery.” Inside the glitzy Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles, she shadowed the 100 finalists on the floor of the 24th Annual Bake-Off, portraying contestants as small-town simpletons of dubious culinary aptitude. The acerbic Ephron was never known for spinning sugar just to make candy, so it wasn’t surprising that she found these prize-winning confections so pedestrian.
She conceals neither her disdain for the spectacle nor her prejudices as a big-city food snob. “None of the recipes seemed to contain one cup of sugar when two would do,” Ephron writes, “or a delicate cheese when Kraft American would do, or an actual m...