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Phillip Scarborough wasn’t able to compete in last year’s Great PurpleHull Peas and Cornbread Cook Off.

The three-time purple hull pea-cooking champ from Texarkana, Texas, had business obligations in Massachusetts. The cook off, part of the Emerson, Ark., PurpleHull Pea Festival, had to proceed without its defending champ.

To make matters worse, the Travel Channel program Taste of America was in Emerson at the cook off in 2007. Scarborough missed his chance to achieve national pea-cooking fame via a national television cable channel.

But at the festival Satu...