Rotary Club since the forties, has been the pudding contest held on the last day on Saturday. And my mother entered it every year from the forties till she left us in 1999. During that time, this beloved family recipe, going on two centuries old, has been used over and over…in our family and many others as it has been widely published. And no one probably ever won more prizes with this recipe in that contest than Edith, including two firsts! Being exacting about the execution of the recipe apparently did not count as much as the persimmon variety in her book as well as her special artistic touch, and in at least one of those ‘firsts’ she left out an important ingredient but won anyway. The day was spent in grand fretting, as she could not recall adding either egg or butter. But she won…and she was so competitive about it, that she sent my dad uptown to the Public Service Indiana building, the electric company, which displayed Purdue botanist Ed Marshall’s 18 or so varieties of persimmons in the window every year, along with the contest winners, on a typewritten plain sheet of paper, taped to the window above them with twenty winners. Edith could not bear to go and look for herself, waiting patiently on her enclosed front porch on tree lined north 8th street all afternoon, rocking away in a century old wicker rocker handed down in her father’s family.

This moment culminated in grand anticipation after a week of city wide activities, including food tents on Main Street featuring persimmon pudding and carnival rides, in a final day of the big parade that passed in front of Edith’s home of forty plus years with the family gathered on the porch or next to the street under the aging mature trees, the butter basted grilled chicken Dad would bring home from the Lions Club stand for lunch and then the big wait for the news…who won the pudding contest this year??? You already have the persimmon pudding recipe, a permanent fixture here, but you can see on the following page one of the many versions of the old butter baste recipes that may have been used for this simple to prepare grilled chicken, delicious!!!

NOTE: Sadly, for the first time ever, there will be no Persimmon Festival this year…but the memories live on…