In a high-tech world of PCs and PCBs, MRIs and CD-ROMs, it's nice to know that some things remain down home. What could be more enduring, more comforting, than the Maryland State Fair? It's 10 days of life just like it was when you were a kid -- champion cows, farm machines, Ferris wheel and Tilt-A-Whirl rides, 4-H projects, luscious fruits and vegetables, beautiful quilts and clothing, prize-winning pies and cakes and cookies and jams and jellies.

When the fair opens at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, Anna Troyer will be there, as she has been pretty much every year since she was a 10-year-old 4-H-er some decades ago. Although the look of the fair has changed somewhat -- "I remember big old trees and lovely old buildings," she says -- Mrs. Troyer says the fair is "still a family thing. Families still do the fair."

As home arts chairman of the fair, Mrs. Troyer, a retired teacher, oversees a wide range of activities, from flower shows to quilt displays to weaving and spinning to fruit and vegetable exhibits to cooking contests.

"I've seen a resurgence in the food-preservation area, and that's very interesting," she says. It's an area that was very strong in the '70s, then waned somewhat in the '80s, but now it's back. Last year the category had 954 entries. "People really take great pride in canning all sorts of things," Mrs. Troyer says, from tomato juice to crab soup to home- grown fruits and vegetables to pickles and preserves.

Cooking contests still attract lots of fans. This year, besides the usual fair categories for food competitions -- there are more than 250 categories in the food division, more than 1,030 categories in all of the home arts areas -- there'll be local precursors to national cooking contests from Spam, Land O' Lakes and Fleischman's yeast. "People are interested in those," Mrs. Troyer says. "They have those nice prizes." (This year the local contests offer first prizes of $100. Winners of regular contests win ribbons and small cash prizes of $3-$10.)

Another exhibit that attracts a lot of entries is the baking show, Mrs. Troyer says. Among categories are cakes, brownies, oatmeal cookies, chocolate chip cookies, yeast breads and quick breads. This year there's a peach pie contest.

"We also have the Governor's Cake class," Mrs. Troyer says, a competition for the most beautifully decorated cake. The type of cake doesn't matter, but all the decorations must be edible. Cakes are judged and then, on Governor's Day (next Wednesday this year), the blue-ribbon winner has a chance to come to the fair and present his or her cake to the governor.

Spam-men

"His or her" is appropriate because there are always men entering the cooking contests, Mrs. Troyer says. She hasn't tallied the entries yet this year, she says, but "I have a good number of men entered in the Spam contest." How do people cook with Spam? Well, there are Spam fritters, Spam stir fries, and baked Spam, for starters.

In addition to the contests, commodity groups from throughout the state feature Maryland products at the Maryland Foods Pavilion. Each day a new product is highlighted. Some of this year's starring commodities are pork (this Saturday), seafood (next Tuesday), dairy (next Thursday) and fruits and vegetables (next Friday). There will be cooking demonstrations, food samples, and recipes given away at the pavilion.

There are some small ways in which the food exhibits have changed, Mrs. Troyer says. "We do not have people bring in an entire cake and leave it." Instead, people are asked to bring half the cake, or whatever the item is. "So half is left for the family to eat," she says. "We realize it gets pretty expensive if you bake all these things for the fair," especially if there's a lot of recipe testing involved, or the person is entering in multiple categories. The fair doesn't keep statistics on how many people have multiple entries, but Mrs. Troyer believes there's wide variety. "Some people enter once every two years, with some beautiful hooked rug they're been working on all that time, and some enter 25 categories every year," she says.

After judging, half of the food entries are given to local charities. "We do try to be part of the community," she says.

Veteran fair competitor Carolyn E. Jendrek says she first became interested in the fair in 1976, when there was a great deal of attention because of the Bicentennial celebration. Her son encouraged her to enter, she says, "and I did enter, and I did win some things. And I was hooked, I've been entering ever since."

Mrs. Jendrek, 72, has entered in home-arts categories as diverse as plants and flowers, jellies and preserves, pickles, canned vegetables and canned fruit. She even entered her daughter's wedding dress, which she made. Her peach marmalade won a blue ribbon in the early '80s.

"I love the fair," she says. "It's just so much fun."

Creative challenge

"It's the challenge of creating something different enough to win" that keeps her interested in food competitions at the fair, says Tai Linkous, a veteran entrant who last year won second place in the Land O' Lakes Light Sour Cream and No-Fat Sour Cream Quick Bread Contest and third place in the Best Spam Recipe contest. She's also had winning entries in the candy category and in jams, jellies, cakes and breads.

This year she's entering in jams and jellies, pickles, canned tomatoes, chili sauce, salsa categories as well as having seven entries in breads and seven or eight entries in candy. She's also entering all three nationally sponsored contests.

She became seriously interested in entering fair competitions in the late 1980s, says Mrs. Linkous, a retired executive secretary who lives in Glen Arm. Now she's got her routine down to an art. "The canned things I start as soon as my tomatoes start to ripen," she says. "I dip the chocolates a week or so ahead, because they will keep. Everything that's baked I do the day before, so my oven is going all day long!"

Mrs. Linkous has another role in the fair: She will be demonstrating "Magic with Refrigerator Dough" next Thursday in the home arts hall, showing home cooks how to used refrigerated dough in new and interesting ways. "It's everything from crescent rolls to pie crust," she says. "Things you can do quickly, because so many women these days don't have time to cook."

"New and interesting" might be the watchwords for the 4-H crowd at the fair. "When you think of the fair, you think of cakes and cookies -- things people really like eating," says Edith Williams, the state 4-H program specialist based at the University of Maryland College Park. However, she says, in recent years "we have made some changes in our exhibits. We're trying to get them aligned with our teaching" in nutrition and healthy eating. "There are no pies -- we took them out. We took out chocolate chip cookies, too."

What's in? "We added corn bread, which is a much more nutritious product than biscuits. We added gingerbread."

Jamming with jams

However, jams and jellies, which had gotten the ax for being high in sugar and calories, are back in, "because people don't usually eat large amounts of those things, and we thought it could be something a kid could do for an entrepreneurial project," Ms. Williams says.

For the same reason -- it represents a marketable skill -- there continues to be a category for decorated cakes, she says.

The 4-H area also includes nutrition-message posters created by the youngsters and a "nutrition bowl" structured like a quiz show, where teams of youngsters in three age divisions try to get the most right answers on questions drawn from their 4-H nutrition-project manuals.

There's also a consumer challenge, in which kids are asked to select the best product available from a selection to fit the lifestyle needs of a fictitious person. They might, for instance, be asked to select the best cereal product for a young person who needs a hearty breakfast but doesn't have a lot of money.

With 38,000 4-H-ers spread across the state, participation is high in all the contests, projects and events, she says. There's a further incentive beyond knowledge: the fair gives cash premiums to winners. (Amounts are based on the number of entries.) It's a good way for kids who are saving for cars or college to make some money, she says. "Some of the youth enter lots of items and carry off hundreds of dollars."

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Here is a winning recipe from last year's fair from Tai Linkous.

Tex-Mex Pull-Apart Bread

Serves six to eight

2 cups flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon garlic salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1 4-ounce can green chilies, drained and finely chopped

2 tablespoons dried (dehydrated) onion

1 cup Monterey Jack cheese, shredded

1 cup light sour cream

1/3 cup milk

2 tablespoons melted margarine or butter

Heat oven to 400 degrees.

Combine first five ingredients in large mixing bowl. Toss chilies, onions and cheese together lightly. Stir cheese mixture, sour cream and milk into flour mixture. Stir just until soft dough forms.

Turn out onto floured board and knead lightly. Roll out to a 1/4 -inch. Cut into 2-inch rounds with biscuit cutter. (Makes about 20 rounds.) Brush tops with melted margarine.

Stand rounds on edge in two rows on ungreased baking sheet. Press rows together to form a double loaf. Brush tops with remaining margarine or butter. Bake at 400 degrees 25 to 30 minutes until golden brown.

Serve warm with soup or salad.

Per 1/10th of loaf: calories, 474; protein, 17 g; fat, 9 g; sodium, 610 mg; carbohydrates, 80 g.

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Here is Mrs. Jendrek's blue-ribbon recipe:

Peach Marmalade

Makes 5 8-ounce jars

6 yellow peaches

2 oranges

1/2 lemon

sugar (see instructions for amount)

Chop the peaches. Put the oranges and the 1/2 lemon in a food processor and chop. Mix citrus with peaches. Measure this and add an equal amount of granulated sugar. Let mixture stand overnight. The next morning boil it off for 20 minutes and pour into 5 hot, sterilized 8-ounce jars. Seal. Refrigerate after opening.

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Laura Gist, 13, of Carroll County, was 4-H Intermediate Grand Champion last year with this dessert recipe.

Perfect Chocolate Cake

Serves 8 to 10

1 cup cocoa

2 cups boiling water

1 cup butter, softened

2 1/2 cups sugar

4 eggs

3 cups cake flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 2 nine-inch cake pans.

Combine cocoa and boiling water, stirring until smooth. Set aside. Cream butter, gradually adding sugar, beating well at medium speed with an electric mixer.

Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture to the egg mixture alternating with the cocoa mixture and beating at low speed with electric mixer, beginning and ending with flour mixture.

Stir in vanilla. Do not over-beat.

Pour batter into prepared cake pans.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.

Cool in pans 10 minutes. Remove from pans, cool completely.

Three-way Chocolate Butter Cream Frosting

Makes about 2 cups

3 cups confectioners' sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened

1/4 cup milk

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 envelopes (or to taste) unsweetened chocolate flavor (such as Nestle Choco Baked)

In mixing bowl, blend confectioners' sugar, butter, vanilla and chocolate flavor. Gradually beat in milk, 1 tablespoon at a time, until frosting is a smooth spreading consistency.

Spread frosting between layers, on top and sides. Chill until serving time.

Per serving (cake with icing): calories, 705; protein, 8 g; fat, 20 g; sodium, 625 mg; carbohydrates, 130 g.