Posted by The Sarasota Herald Tribune, FL on April 25, 2008 at 10:03:31:
Doctor takes cast-iron skillet to cooking finals
By Bill Hutchinson
Published Friday, April 25, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.
NOKOMIS — The temperature is supposed to be mild all weekend along the Tennessee-Alabama border, which is good news for Ann Piscitelli, a Nokomis doctor who drove up that way to spend Saturday making cornbread in a circus tent.
It is a longish story, how the 1987 Pine View grad and University of Miami-trained internist came to be distinguished for her cornbread, one of 10 finalists in Saturday's National Cornbread Festival Cook-Off in South Pittsburg, Tenn.
But it is an even longer story how there happened to be a National Cornbread Festival at all in the tiny town of South Pittsburg, population 3,500, more or less near Chattanooga.
A century ago in South Pittsburg, the Lodge Foundry began turning out cast-iron skillets that are known to this day as the ne plus ultra of American cast-iron skillets.
Old-fashioned, down-home American cornbread is traditionally made in a cast-iron skillet, and in Tennessee, at least, it is made with Martha White Cornmeal, a product of the Martha White baking products empire just down the road from South Pittsburg.
When the town started to go bankrupt a while back, community leaders used South Pittsburg's historic association with cornbread to drum up corporate sponsorship from the cornmeal people and the skillet people for a big-time tourist event they claim has now revitalized their "little town with a big heart," as their Web site describes South Pittsburg.
As many as 25,000 people are expected for this year's festival, the 12th annual, ending Sunday in a celebrity cook-off among local television personalities, public officials and someone who calls himself Deputy Bubba Fife.
The main event, though, is Saturday's competitive cook-off, with Piscitelli's Mediterranean Chicken and Polenta going head-to-head with a lineup including Savory Prosciutto-Fontina Cornbread Pudding (Las Vegas) and Muffalletta Cornbread Casserole with Buttermilk Basil Sauce (Knoxville).
None of this year's cook-off finalists involve cornbread as it is strictly defined, which is fine with contest officials.
The rules insist only that Martha White products and a Lodge skillet be used to make the food, and that the recipe include no alcohol.
Piscitelli, who trained by making her dish twice in the week before the contest ("We're a little over it by now"), took this to mean that South Pittsburg is located in a dry county, which she did not regard as good news.
Nor was she pleased with the idea of actually being expected to follow the recipe that she submitted.
"I don't measure," she says. "My husband never gets the same thing twice."
Piscitelli began cooking when she started her medical residency in Augusta, Ga., the same year the cornbread cook-off began, 1996, because "money was tight and it was cheaper than eating out."
When she and her husband, whom she met in medical school, settled in the Venice area to open their joint practice, cooking became a hobby.
And so it remains, to the extent allowed by the presence of twin toddlers in the household. Piscitelli made Thai food for 10 friends last Friday, and every year does Thanksgiving dinner for 20 or so, but typically "the degree of difficulty of what I'm cooking has declined."
These days, she gets her heaviest culinary fix from food television, which she watches "way too much," she says, and from which she was introduced to the world of cooking contests.
"Some of these things pay, like, $100,000," Piscitelli says. "That sounds pretty good to me."
Anybody who thinks that she and her husband must be free of financial pressure because of their line of work "obviously hasn't been talking to many doctors in Sarasota County lately," she says.
Eighty percent of her patients are on Medicare, meaning low-rate reimbursement, meaning that the $5,000 she stands to win would come in handy for her plans to "childproof my yard."
This is only the second cooking contest Piscitelli has entered, the first being one of those $100,000 affairs, where she got nowhere.
The festival sent the names and addresses of its cook-off finalists to media outlets all over the country, resulting in a level of attention Piscitelli at first neither expected nor welcomed.
"If I win, of course, I will want everyone to know, she says. "If I lose, it's all kind of embarrassing."
On the other hand, being a finalist means a $100 honorarium and $500 in travel expenses, enough to cover the gas on the family's first road trip since the boys were born.
Cornbread festival events include a buttermilk-chugging contest and performances by a bluegrass group called the Dismembered Tennesseans.
It "sounds a little 'Deliverance'-y" to Piscitelli, but an honor is an honor.
The doctor, as they say, is in.