The fare of the fair

There is a lot of talk these days that Americans are worried about our diets, eating smaller portions, counting calories.

Maybe so, but not when at the Maryland State Fair. The state fair is a time for indulgence. In the waning days of summer, it is an opportunity to take one last bite of the season, and in most cases, that bite is a big one.

On Friday, the first day of the fair, I scampered through the admission gates, and faster than you can say "now frying," I was visiting a corn dog stand on the midway.

All over America, state fair concessionaires put morsels on sticks and deep-fry them. In Florida, they deep-fry pickles, calling them Frickles. In California, they put squid on a stick. In Minnesota, an epicenter of deep-fried activity, I am told they put cheese curds, spaghetti and meatballs, and pizza on a stick. Reports are out that ambitious fryers there are even attempting to put Sloppy Joes on a stick and boil them in oil.

Among all the items dipped in the fryer, the corn dog, a hot dog coated with a corn meal batter, is the iconic fair food. Its round, browned body is found on almost every midway. Kids clamor for it. Parents frown at it, especially if their kids are going to go on any stomach-churning rides after eating. Food historians debate its origins. (Minnesota and Texas claim it as theirs.)

For Doug Barker, there is no debate about the corn dog's lineage. Standing in the aptly named Fry City concession stand on the Maryland State Fair midway, Barker told me that the corn dog hailed from Hughes Springs, Texas, his hometown. Hughes Springs has a population of only 1,200, he said, but it has a higher percentage of corn dog connoisseurs than any other community on the globe.

Moreover, the batter that encases the corn dog is made in Hughes Springs, Barker said. The corn dog batter recipe, he said, follows one set down ages ago by the McKinney family, longtime residents of Hughes Springs.

When Barker and his boss (and fellow Hughes Springs resident), Jay Russell, hit the road to work state fairs around the country, they always carry 25-pound bags of Corn Dog 7, a batter mix from their area.

Barker, a tall drink of water with a heavy Texas accent, demonstrated the correct way to batter a corn dog. He dipped a hot dog in the batter, and then quickly pulled it out.

"Too much batter and the dogs get mealy," he explained.

Modern corn dog cooks have it easier than old timers, he said. That is because these days the dogs are "pre-stuck." That means a wooden skewer has been inserted in the hot dog at a factory. Until about four years ago, you had to "stick" each corn dog by hand, he said. At a state fair the size of Maryland's, about 10,000 corn dogs would be sold, he said. That, he said, was a lot of sticking.

After the pre-stuck dog was battered, it was turned upside down, and snapped into a nifty device that held it in a bath of 375-degree soybean oil.

You cook by color, Barker said, but usually they are brown in about two and half minutes.

He handed me a $4 corn dog that had emerged fresh from the fryer. The corny covering was still warm, the hot dog was cooked, yet firm. It was good, but a little bland, I told him.

The true Texas way to eat a corn dog, Barker said, is to add a block of cheddar cheese and a jalapeno pepper to the corn dog, then put the whole thing in a fryer.

Now that is eating, he said.

Keeping with the deep-fried theme, I moved from the corn dog stand to one selling deep-fried Oreos.

Jacqueline DeGouveia showed me how to deep-fry the cookie. She took a handful of the cookies, coated them in what she called a "sweet cake batter" and then dropped them in hot vegetable oil.

In about three minutes, they were done. She put the fried Oreos, now looking like puffed-up brown golf balls, into a paper container and sprinkled them with powdered sugar.

"We sold a lot of these in Cecil County," she told me, referring to an earlier stop the stand had made on this summer's fair circuit.