The fair goes gourmet

This weekend, the SEMO District Fair begins its 151st year.

Whether it's the antique tractor pull, the fireworks, the rooster crowing contest or big-name entertainment in the person of Ronnie Milsap, it has something for everyone. But to me, the biggest attraction is the food.

Now, you might not think of the fair -- a purveyor of corn dogs, funnel cakes and fried potato spirals -- as a place for gourmet food, but it has something in common with The Four Seasons restaurant in New York City, a place which has been called "the Holy See of food in America." For both offer what former circus clown Bruce Feiler calls America's most overlooked contribution to world cuisine: cotton candy.

Yes, The Four Seasons, the only New York restaurant to be designated a landmark, where JFK celebrated his 45th birthday (prior to being serenaded by Marilyn Monroe at Madison Square Garden), where a burger fetches around $30 and a serving of white-truffle risotto will set you back $125, has for decades been offering cotton candy as an end-of-the-meal treat or for special occasions. The birthday version is a 3-foot tower of the stuff festooned with sugared violets, with a scoop of ice cream at its base and a candle on top.

The Four Seasons isn't the only high-brow New York area restaurant dishing up cotton candy. At Brennan's Seafood and Chop House they bring a cone of it with the check, at the Park Avenue CafZ they stick tufts of it into the lemon poppy seed cake, at the Venue restaurant across the river in Hoboken they dust it with curry powder and garnish the squash soup with it, and at the Japanese restaurant Kenka in the East Village there's a cotton candy machine where diners can try their hand at making their own, using chopsticks instead of the usual paper cone.

Not bad for a concoction that started out as "fairy floss." That's the name used by William Morrison and John C. Wharton who invented the first electric cotton candy machine in 1897. (In Australia it's still called that. In Britain it's candy floss and in France "barbe ‡ papa" or daddy's beard.) There have been others who claim to have invented the confection--Josef Dalarose, a New Orleans dentist (perhaps hoping to spur business) and Thomas Patton, a circus vendor whose machine was gas-fired rather than electric. But Morrison and Wharton were the ones who first popularized cotton candy when they took their contraption to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and dispensed nearly 70,000 servings of the stuff.

Listen to A Harte Appetite Fridays at 8:49 a.m. on KRCU, 90.9 on your FM dial. Write A Harte Appetite, c/o the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or by e-mail to tharte@ semissourian.com.