The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has had lots of contests. This one was likely the most popular

The holiday season is a deliciously nostalgic time, one filled with memories of loved ones coming together to break bread and pass down family traditions.

Recipes have been passed down for millennia, and they have only improved with time, increased food resources, and the growth of social networking technology and mass media. Locally, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has historically served as a significant source of culinary inspiration, especially beginning in the 1960s with the introduction of its annual recipe contest.

The Star-Telegram has been known to host a contest or two throughout its history. It has challenged readers with a Home Sewing Contest, Scholastic Writing Contest, various photo contests, and, most recently, the Peeps Diorama Contest. From 1966 until 1985, it held what was perhaps its longest running and most popular competition — the Star-Telegram Recipe Contest.

In the contest’s first year, judges received a whopping 35,000 recipe entries contributed by over 6,000 eager chefs. Entrants could contribute recipes within six categories: breads, salads, meats, entrees, vegetables, and desserts. The categories later fluctuated to include soups, outdoor cooking recipes, and hors d’oeuvres. Contest rules granted women unlimited entries while men could only enter one recipe per category until 1972, when all entrants were limited to one submission per category. In 1974, 450 junior chefs entered the contest when it opened to middle and high school students to compete separately from the adults.

Contest judges were made up of “leading Tarrant County home economists,” to include home economics students from Texas Christian University and Texas Wesleyan University, as well as professional home economists from businesses like the Texas Electric Service Co. and Lone Star Gas Co. By its third year, judges spent a reported 272 hours in recipe evaluation, grocery buying, food preparation, and sampling. Judging criteria of recipes centered around originality and simplicity in preparing each dish — beef wellington recipes need not apply!

The prize offerings, which often filled half a page in the paper, were quite appetizing. Winners received a host of home goods donated by local businesses, ranging from stoves to refrigerators to sewing machines, alongside more unconventional awards like a case of Heinz pickles with an accompanying pickle-shaped swimming pool float, 50 gallons of Conoco gasoline, a dance class, and a fashionable wig. Winning recipes were published in the paper — often amid Weight Watchers and Nutrisystem ads — and later incorporated into a series of cookbooks.

A sampling of recipe contest winners

Most winners submitted recipes passed down to them from family members, neighbors, or friends, sometimes incorporating their own spin on ingredients or preparation method.

In 1966, J. Paul Johnston of Hurst, a retired railway mail clerk who turned to cooking as a form of therapy, took home the top prize in the inaugural competition for his Canadian White Fruit Cake recipe. Sally Ferrell, 1969 winner, expressed hardships while cooking during the Great Depression and hoped her winning salad recipe would inspire other cooks to bring more creativity to their dinners outside of the standard meat and potatoes.

Fort Worth fire lieutenant Joe W. Buswold of Station No. 4 won the grand prize in 1970 with his “Buzz’s Fire House Lasagne” recipe. The dish beat out more than 5,000 other recipes. The serving size provided in the recipe serves “six hungry firefighters or eight to 10 normal people.” Ultimately, Buswold was one of only three men to win the competition’s grand prize.

Buswold attributed his skills and love for cooking to his mother, Dorothy, and further refined his craft while serving in the Navy as a cook during World War II. According to firefighters who worked during Buswold’s shift, among his culinary specialties were pancakes and sausage, potato salad, scalloped potatoes, chicken and dumplings, and goulash. Buswold claimed that fire calls would sometimes interrupt his cooking, leading to a few burnt lasagnas — just one of the hazards of the job.

One of the most prolific Star-Telegram Recipe Contest competitors was Olga Jaecks. When she wasn’t busy entering her recipes in various cooking competitions, she worked as a supervisor in Paschal High School’s cafeteria. While she couldn’t quite secure the competition’s grand prize, Jaecks placed in every single category possible from her entries spanning 1968-1984. Her winning recipes included Italian meatloaf, Mexican baked beans, spiced apple mini pies, sweet potato salad, Tampico barbecued ribs, orange spice chicken, and apricot nut chicken.

Jaecks believed the most important ingredients were “a dash of imagination and a handful of luck.” Her lucky Paradise Fruit Salad recipe led to an invitation to compete in the National Pineapple Cooking Classic held in Honolulu in 1972, and she was later invited to compete in the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1976 and 1978. Following the end to the Star-Telegram Recipe Contest, Jaecks’ culinary legacy lived on as her delectable recipes were regularly featured in the Star-Telegram’s “Reader Recipe of the Week” series.

In 1983, a handy glossary of cooking terms accompanied the winning recipes. Star-Telegram columnist Bill Youngblood wrote in appreciation of this glossary and suggested a few terms to be added for novice chefs who were perhaps not as adept at cooking. His list of proposed terms included “burned beyond recognition” to describe what happens to almost anything you stick in the oven, “en le linoleum” to indicate where most of the lettuce and tomatoes go when trying to toss together salad ingredients, and “McDonald’s,” which Youngblood described as “where you and the family wind up eating when everything you’ve prepared turns out scarred and charred.”

The conclusion of the Star-Telegram Recipe Contest led to the publication of the “Cooking Up a Storm” cookbooks, its name stemming from the readers recipe exchange series that began in 1967 by longtime food writer, later food editor, Jo Ann Vachule. The cookbooks were compiled by Star-Telegram food writer Beverly Bundy, with the first edition published in 1988 and its eighth and final edition published in 1995. If you’re lucky, you can snatch up a few editions for yourself on eBay.

For those who find comfort in flipping through that family heirloom cookbook or those scribbled out recipe cards for ideas, I would highly recommend searching through the trove of award-winning reader recipes that can be found within the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper archives.

Sara Pezzoni works toward promoting greater access to Fort Worth Star-Telegram archival collection materials as a staff member of the Special Collections department at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.