Our Superbowl party turned into a British booze-up
‘The advanced-level party dish is a snackadium, a replica football pitch in dips and chips’
I have made two discoveries this week:
1Uber
in New York will deliver a puppy to your house for a 15-minute cuddle in return for a small donation to an Animal Rescue Centre: I feel we have reached the summit of urban evolution.
2On
Sunday, 1.3 billion chicken wings were consumed by Americans attending Superbowl parties.
Despite the popularity of these events, nobody invited us to theirs, so we hosted our own at home for any British here who were feeling similarly left out: there were about 20 attendees though in all honesty I feel it would have been helpful if one of us had known the rules of the game. As an alternative to participation, we concentrated on snacks.
The famous, though advanced level, Superbowl party dish is called a “snackadium”: a replica football pitch where the stands are constructed from crisps, tortilla chips, pretzels and breadsticks, and the pitch is made out of dips: guacamole for the grass, hummus for the touchdown areas.
We didn’t feel up to that mighty task, so instead we provided what they consider entry-level fare… ribs in bbq sauce, wings roasted in hot sauce, hot dogs broiled in beer, meatballs wrapped in strips of bacon and the legendary seven-layered dip – yup, that’s seven different dips layered on top of each other (yuck).
Our sitting room had pompoms, posters, football-shaped lanterns, a tablecloth looking like astro-turf, Super ‘bowls’ for tortilla chips, face paint and hair dye in team colours... but the star of the show was the sandwich we ordered from the local deli. The beast was six feet long – one foot longer than my 12-year-old son, and one foot shorter than our dining room table. It was filled with smoked turkey, ham, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. A major feat of engineering but sadly, despite its might and size, it tasted mostly of American bread.
For pudding we served rainbow bagels: they’re made in a small bakery in Brooklyn, where the dough is flavoured with vanilla, dyed six colours of the rainbow, layered together, twisted and then knotted into perfect little buns. They’re boiled and baked, split in two, spread with cream cheese that has added cake and funfetti (hundreds and thousands) and heaped with an additional layer of multi coloured candy floss. The result is outrageously, brilliantly, pointlessly delicious: tiny little works of art, laden with sugar, tasting of fun fairs.
My favourite party moment was the random arrival of a woman who my son had sat next to in the hairdressers earlier in the week. She had explained that her father played in the very first Superbowl in 1966. Spike had been entranced and half an hour before the game began, she appeared on our doorstep to give him an original 1960s American football card signed by her late dad: it felt like the sort of urban myth that encouraged us to come here in the first place.
Because we had the slight issue of not knowing the rules of the game, we planned other entertainments. We had intended to take bets on the length of Lady Gaga’s rendition of The Star
Spangled Banner, the first song choice by Coldplay, and the biggest buns and guns on a player. We had mini inflatable goal posts through which to throw mini inflatable balls – and a sweepstake to fleece our friends.
But sadly real life intervened and it turned into the most British of parties… the TV was shunned in favour of chatting, and beers were drunk at a rate of about three an hour. This would have worked fine for Tottenham’s brilliant 90-minute triumph over Watford on Saturday, but the Superbowl is four hours long, and the colours of the leftover neon bagels at 7am the following morning actually hurt my eyes. Morning afters feel just as bad on both sides of the Atlantic.