I’ll Always Look Forward to the County Fair.

My very first county fair competition. Entry: apple pie.

The Iredell County Fair office, in Troutman, NC.

Prize-winning poultry is always a local draw.

Country fair corn dogs and fries. Old-timey soda in tin cans.

Demolition derby racers waiting for the starting flag to drop.

When the sun goes down, the lights come on at the Iredell Country fair.

The entry to the midway of rides, food and games.

It was 10:00 PM on Saturday night when I got her text. 

“So, what are you going to enter?” 

I headed straight to my pantry and opened the door. The shelves were jammed with jellies and pickles, the colorful trophies of a productive summer spent canning in my kitchen. I slid the pickled figs out of the way to get a better look: lemony pickled cauliflower, cardamom and lemon thyme fig preserves, spicy pickled okra, gingered carrots and daikon radish coins, pickled jalapeno peppers, sweet pickled beets, and peaches. So. Many. Peaches. After three months of hot burners, steaming jars and hard work, I’d stocked away plenty of creative flavor experiments. 

But this was not the time to be experimental. There were county fair ribbons at stake. Not to mention prize money that could almost cover your gasoline to and from the fairgrounds. Stick to the classics, I told myself. Just as you’re not a French pastry chef if you can’t bake an airy Madeline, you’re not a Southern food preserver if you can’t pickle a ripe peach. 

“My peaches have good color,” I texted in reply. “I’m also thinking about pickled peppers? Definitely pickled red onions. What about you?” I was a little giddy with excitement. 

“I’m doing baby beets! And maybe a few other things we grew on the farm,” she texted me. “I’ll pick you up Tuesday?”

“I’ll be ready!” I said. 

For the rest of the weekend, I thought about traveling up rural highway 115 to Troutman, and entering an armload of colorful jars in the fair. I wondered about the competition. In Iredell County there are plenty of farmer’s wives with a lifetime of practice under their aprons. I struggled with a moment of imposter syndrome. Then I remembered, I’d won ribbons before. A second place ribbon for apple pie, and a first place ribbon for salted caramels, both of which are proudly framed on the wall in my kitchen.  

My canning buddy, Elizabeth Carrigan, was raised on a North Carolina century farm. She and her brother, William, have been entering vegetables in the Iredell County Fair since they were shorter than the okra bushes. Their grandmother, Phylis, is responsible for my love of canning. She taught me how to pickle beets in her cozy farm kitchen nearly two decades ago. Not a summer has gone by since that I don’t thank her for helping me get past my irrational fear of Botulism. 

Tuesday finally arrived, and Elizabeth and I sat on squeaky stools in my kitchen. We poured through the fair rulebook searching for the category numbers to write down on our paper entry forms. Sure, we could have completed the forms online. But it was just more fun to do it the old fashioned way. After all, isn’t that the spirit of canning? Anyone can buy a jar of pickles at the grocery store. But going through the painstaking process of spicing them just how you like and water bath canning them yourself? Well, they just taste better that way.

My entry form read, Department F, Class 8, Lot 7: Peaches, yellow. Department F, Class 11, Lot 17. Pickled red onion. Department F, Class 11, Lot 12: Pickled hot peppers. 

We put our pens down, high-fived each other, and decided to burn up a road to Troutman in Elizabeth’s car. With some gentle cajoling (soda crackers), I convinced Bruno, her golden retriever, to surrender the passenger seat to me. I climbed in and was charged with balancing a vase of perfectly arranged sunflowers between my knees. Department D, Class 6, Lot 11, arrangement of six stemmed sunflowers. The scent of an authentic North Carolina family farm drifted up from the back seat. It smelled of fresh-picked peppers, sunflowers, red Carolina clay, and wet dog. 

Halfway to the fairgrounds, I suddenly panicked. “Do my jars need rings?!” (Rings hold the lids on during food preservation, and I always remove them to make sure the jars are properly sealed.) 

Elizabeth reminded me, “Yes, it’s in the rule book. You’ve gotta have rings,” 

Darned if I didn’t have fifty odd rings sitting in a drawer back home in my kitchen. But we agreed to keep going and stop at the nearest Food Lion so that I could purchase a few more. After all, ribbons were at stake. And, a potential $5 in prize money, per entry. On aisle three I discovered the sad remnants of an end-of-summer canning selection. My only option was to buy $30 worth of brand new canning jars. It’s apple season, I told myself. Surely I’ll make good use of the jars. 

We reached the fairgrounds and perked up as we pulled in through the rusty gates. The old wooden fair office was exactly as last year, and all the years before, had left it. Decades old paneled walls, threadbare carpet, an ancient PC wired to a printer that still works, except when it doesn’t. I grinned, rest-assured that the Statesville Kiwanis Club, who puts on the Iredell County Agricultural Fair, is still clearly giving away their profits to fund scholarships and support important local organizations. On the counter were a couple dozen pizza boxes, one of the more alluring perks of working on ‘entry day’ as a Kiwanis volunteer.  

The cheerful woman who accepted our paper forms wore a T-shirt that said, Grab Your Balls, It’s Canning Season! (For non-canners, Balls are a brand of jars). After typing our data into the computer and banging on the printer to get it working, she handed us our entry tickets and pointed us in the direction of the canning room where we could surrender our children. I mean, our perfectly packed jars. 

The Volunteers in Department F were upbeat despite it being ninety-five degrees inside the building. Squeaky electric fans whirred, pushing hot air into still corners of the room. Two ladies were busy arranging the entries carefully on the shelves. “Could you make sure to face the pretty side outward?” I sheepishly asked after handing her my jar of peaches. “Sure thing honey!” she said. When I strolled by a few minutes later to check, I noticed that she had done the opposite. Elizabeth and I briefly discussed a plan to distract the volunteers and give my jar of peaches a quarter turn. But instead, we just shrugged and decided to leave it to fate, and the country fair judges.

After spending a little more time sizing up the competition, we headed to the Agriculture tent where we found a smattering of early entries and talkative volunteers. We admired the ‘tallest sunflower’ entry that was lying on the ground, but easily once stood twelve feet high. We heard a bee farmer ask if it was possible to win a trifecta (first, second, and third prize) in the honey category. Elizabeth entered her brother’s eighteen inch diameter sunflower blossom into the appropriately named ‘giants’ category. She carefully arranged okra and red peppers on red plastic plates provided by fair volunteers. Then she taped entry numbers to her brother’s prized ‘warty’pumpkins, and placed them on the shelf wartiest side out. We high-fived each other for the second time that day, and wished each other good luck. We could almost feel the prize money in our pockets.

“I’m concerned.” Elizabeth leaned in and whispered to me. “I noticed my beets weren’t placed with the other beets.” 

“Let’s go back and investigate!” I eagerly suggested. Secretly, I was just hoping to take one last look at my competition. 

Back in the canning room, Elizabeth spotted her rogue jar of beets. She asked the volunteer at the desk if she could move them. “Sure!” said the woman. “But those over there are pressure canned, and yours are pickled.” Our cheeks flushed with embarrassment, but our county fair mystery was solved! Once more, I bribed Bruno for the passenger seat, and we headed back to Mooresville. This time, the car felt much roomier.  

On the way home we talked about how happy we were that the fair is no better, and no worse, than it has been over the decades that we’ve been participating. Nothing has changed, including the $5 admission. It’s a place undiscovered by Martha Stewart, Tik Tok chefs, and other social media influencers. It’s as real and well trodden as the dirt floor in the livestock barn. I was reminded once again of how important it is to celebrate the small contributions of community agriculture, one fair entry at a time. 

Guess what? I won. Regardless of whether I actually took home a ribbon. I won because I shared a summer in the kitchen with my canning friends. I won because I snuggled a dirty wet farm dog on the way to the fair office, and ate two corn dogs fried by Kiwanis Club volunteers. I won because I browsed the prize winning poultry, admired a blue ribbon floral arrangement, wondered about the safety of the Tilt-A-Whirl, and rode it anyway. I won because I enjoyed a front-row bleacher seat at the fair’s final event, the demolition derby. I couldn’t think of a better way to preserve Southern summer memories if I tried.