America’s culinary landscape has changed in the last 50 years, but the principles represented by Mrs. Smafield’s recipe still inspire home cooks. Prediction: when the centennial Bake-Off is staged in 2049, Water-Rising Twists will rise again. Of course, they won’t precisely resemble the originals. Winning recipes tend to reflect their own gustatory moments; more to the point, savvy Bake-Off contestants aim for novelty. “Submit a recipe that is different from any you have ever seen,” counseled Della Ruth Emerson of Coshocton, Ohio, whose Swiss Chocolate Cheese Cake was featured in the 1959 Bake-Off. She herself had never seen a cheesecake, much less one evoking Switzerland, but rightly figured that shredded coconut would come as a surprise. Half a century from now, designing a recipe with the power to amaze is going to be a far greater challenge. Chocolate kisses, long a favorite novelty ingredient, will have been hidden dozens of times inside everything from popovers to meatballs. The nuoc mam calzone will have come and gone, and even second-graders will yawn over one more batch of ayurvedic mangosteen cupcakes. A truly new Twist will need a twist all its own.

Another challenge will be the increasingly elusive nostalgia factor. A Bake-Off recipe gains an important edge if it reminds us of the days when the food we ate at home was actually cooked there. In 1949, when packaged mixes were arriving on the market, a yeast bread like Mrs. Smafield’s wasn’t yet defined as quaint, but it certainly summoned remembrances of kitchens past. By 1969 mixes had settled irrevocably into the heart of home baking, inspiring Louise Schlinkert of China City, Calif., to press refrigerated cookie dough into a baking pan, then top it with pecans, corn syrup and instant butterscotch pudding. The judges loved her newfangled, old-fashioned pecan pie. Coming by 2050, perhaps: nostalgia in the form of Hot Pastrami Quiche, with vegan pastrami (bioengineered from eggplant and a cow) in a custard of egg substitute, milk substitute and Cool Whip substitute. Or Home-for-the-Holidays Dinner–just buy the new pre-roasted mini-turkeys (one per person, bred to be boneless) and place a stuffing lozenge in each, for the delicious aroma of sage stuffing with none of the mess and calories. By 2049, it shouldn’t take much more than a sprinkle of real cinnamon in a recipe to reduce Bake-Off judges to tears.

So how will a 21st-century Twist look and taste? It won’t be a yeast bread, needless to say–yeast won’t even be available at retail. It won’t need baking, despite the popularity of huge, restaurant-quality ovens, since most people will be keeping arrangements of dried flowers in them. And the sugar coating won’t be necessary, since all staples including salt, flour, milk and tap water will come presweetened. It will have a maximum of two ingredients, and to ensure success, one will undoubtedly be chocolate. The other, for nostalgia purposes, will have a faint air of ethnicity, preferably generic so as not to offend any consumer group. Vanilla should do nicely (and who could quarrel with a long-overdue nod to Madagascar?). Most important, contest rules will specify that recipes must take less than three minutes to assemble. Step one, then, will be to buy an all-purpose chocolate-flavored mix. Prepare it according to the picture directions on the box, add vanilla and work handfuls of the dough into very creative shapes. For that final, gourmet touch, grill the Twists until crunchy. One bite, and you’ll know what the judges meant when they said, “Wow! These taste new.”