Viral Sensation Linda Skeens Releases ‘Blue Ribbon Kitchen’

When the Virginia-Kentucky District Fair & Horse Show posted the 2022 winners of its annual cooking and crafting contests on Facebook last June, the name Linda Skeens seemed to be everywhere. She won 30 ribbons, including for best pie, spaghetti sauce, sauerkraut and chow chow, a pickled relish dish. She swept all three podium spots in the categories for cookies, savory breads and candy, and even won an award for embroidered quilts. This mysterious woman dominated the fair, and the internet wanted to know: Who is Linda Skeens?

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Cook With Linda

Skeens shared three recipes from Blue Ribbon Kitchen for AARP members to try:

Jam Cake with Caramel Glaze

My mommy used to make this one. It was so good. She baked the cake on an old coal cook stove. She cooked the caramel glaze in an iron skillet on top of the stove.

No-Bake Butterscotch Cookies

I’ve always liked making these for bake sales because they’re easy to make, but be aware — they go quickly!

Broccoli Casserole

The cheese cracker topping makes this one unique.

The blue-ribbon renaissance woman’s complete online absence further fueled the mystery on social media. Facebook users posted memes comparing her to Olympic gold medalist swimmer Michael Phelps, and a TikTok featured a ballad about who this mystery champion could be. When fair organizers posted about items left behind at the fairgrounds, a commenter noted, “We all know Linda Skeens didn’t lose anything. Everybody else, check the found items.” Multiple people with the same name posted on social media to clarify they were not the Linda Skeens people sought.

Word trickled down to Russell County, Virginia, where Skeens, 75, lived without social media, an email address or even a cellphone, and things got a bit wild for her. “When it first happened, I told my daughter. We laughed about it, and I said, ‘Well, in about a month, this’ll all blow over and they’ll forget all about me,’” she remembers. “Boy, was I fooled.”

The enigmatic fair queen eventually embraced the fame, joined TikTok, embarked on a media tour and wrote Blue Ribbon Kitchen: Recipes & Tips From America’s Favorite County Fair Champion (July 2023). As much scrapbook as cookbook, it mixes winning recipes for pickled banana peppers, peach-raspberry jam and peanut brittle with scenes from the very offline life of an Appalachian great-grandmother gone viral.

The book features 30 of her ribbon-winning recipes, plus about 70 more, along with heartfelt tributes to friends and family, personal photographs and — because she really does dabble in everything — the occasional poem. Nearly all of the headnotes feature personal anecdotes: how her dad ate those canned peaches on a hot buttered biscuit; that these chocolate chip cookies are a favorite of her grandkids; how her husband always eats two of those rolls with butter as soon as they come out of the oven. She holds nothing back, unintentionally painting a sometimes heartbreakingly honest multigenerational portrait of an Appalachian family, complete with deaths from coal mines, cancer and COVID-19.

Skeens was raised with six siblings in a house that didn’t always have running water, and her father supported the family by working in coal mines for $5 a day. Her family grew nearly all the food they ate, which her mother put up in hundreds of cans each year. “I do cook a lot of country stuff,” Skeens says. “Simple recipes that are good, but don’t take a lot of fancy ingredients or a lot of fancy equipment to do. Just plain cooking.”

She grew up watching her mom make kraut, and after marrying at age 16, she learned her mother-in-law’s special ways of making corn bread dressing and iced tea. She credits her mom throughout the book, from the first recipe, for chow chow, to the jam cake with caramel glaze in the desserts section — which Skeens’ mother made on their old coal cook stove.

“Just watching them, I learned a lot,” she says. With a hint of the attitude that earned her so many ribbons, she adds that she also taught herself a lot. “I decided if I want to do it, I’ll do it. Then I did it.” After Skeens went viral, a woman asked her how many trial runs she makes of her baked goods. She laughs. “I only make it once. If it wins, OK. If it don’t, OK.” The recipes in the book reflect this same blunt practicality and include relatively few ingredients or steps, but — as her blue ribbons show — plenty of flavor.