Add a taste of southern hospitality to your Super Bowl party
Atlanta’s hosting the Super Bowl this Sunday, and we’ve got some great regional dishes for you and your guests
The Super Bowl LIII takes place this Sunday, 3 February at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. Got a tailgate party planned, or are you simply having some friends over for the game?
Then maybe serve some Georgia favourites. Chances are, there's something you like. "Today, Atlanta is an international city, where nearly one in ten residents are immigrants,” explains Gabrielle Langholtz in her forthcoming young person’s guide to American food and recipes, United Tastes of America. “Atlanta’s food reflects this - you’ll find trendy restaurant dishes like heirloom grits with pastured pork, excellent Mexican tacos and tamales, Caribbean jerk chicken and fried plantains, and, from across Africa, jollof rice and boerewors sausage.”
“That’s the New South,” Langholtz adds. “But in Georgia, you can find the Old South, too. That means city tearooms with old recipes and rural mansions that were once plantations. You’ll find gracious Southern hospitality, complete with helpings of Dixie favorites: fried chicken, baked ham, butter beans, fried okra, fried green tomatoes, Savannah red rice, and collard greens, salty from the hambone they were braised with.”
Georgia is known as both the Peach State and the Goober State - “Goober means peanuts in the Bantu family of African languages” Langholtz explains – and its also home to manufactured foodstuffs, such as Coca Cola, which is headquartered in Atlanta, and freer-range ingredients such as Tupelo honey - “When the Tupelo trees bloom in April or May, visiting bees make a delicate honey with a flavor so special, people have written songs about it” - and wild pigs - “For more than 50 years, Georgia politicians have served wild pigs at an annual feast to mark the start of their legislative session.”
Langholtz combines a couple of these ingredients in a peach and Vidalia onion salad, which is seasoned with a teaspoon of honey, lemon juice and mint leaves. “This simple sweet-tart dish is wonderful with grilled chicken or pork, or next to a sandwich when it’s too hot to cook!”
Don’t feel like serving peach salad to your football buddies? Then consider Coca-Cola glazed ham, another Georgia specialty from America the Cookbook.
The recipe combines a bone-in cured ham with a can of coke, as well as orange wedges, Dijon mustard and brown sugar. You rub in the sugar and mustard, pour over the coke, and bake it all, wrapped in foil, for a little over three hours.
You can get the full recipe in America the Cookbook; for more on Georgian food, and delicacies from the other 49 other States, pre-order a copy of United Tastes of America here.