More Top Picks Best 65 Inch Tvs
player ready...Dave Oberg will make chili and Italian beef for guests at his Super Bowl party Sunday.
He will also create salmon mousse with cucumbers that was popular in the 1970s and monkey pizza bread that a local culinary expert called a popular 21st century Super Bowl snack.
It’s the 50th Super Bowl and Oberg, executive director of the Grayslake Heritage Center and Museum, wants to celebrate right.
Oberg, along with the museum board and volunteers, hosted a pre-Super Bowl celebration at the museum Saturday to teach the history of the Super Bowl — including how teams, snacks and commercials changed over five decades.
Connor Casey, a museum intern who is too young to have watched the Chicago Bears win the Super Bowl during the 1985-86 season, presented a slide show where he waxed enthusiastically about the transformation of the first championship game to what he said is now “practically a national holiday.”
“The Super Bowl reflects our culture,” Casey said.
Learning its history is like learning the history of America for the past 50 years, he said.
The first championship game pitted the new American Football League against the incumbent National Football League.
In 1967, the Green Bay Packers, from the long-standing NFL, were supposed to put the Kansas City Chiefs, from the new and so-called unruly AFL in their place, and they did, winning 35-10.
The third championship game was the first to officially be called the Super Bowl, even though then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle hated the name, Casey said.
In the 1970s, the Cowboys and Dolphins dominated, while the Vikings, aka, The Purple People Eaters, lost four Super Bowls.
Of course, anyone from the Chicago area will remember the 1985 season when the Bears won the Super Bowl and did the Super Bowl Shuffle.
“I never saw the game, but it still brings joy for me to think about it because I’m a Bears fan,” Casey said.
By then, “the Super Bowl was starting to take over as an American cultural event,” he told the audience.
Today, it can cost more than $3 million for a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl, Casey said.
“It’s the most economically dramatic event in the U.S.,” he said.
Not everyone can watch the Super Bowl in person. Over the years, Americans learned they could have fun watching the game in front of the television set — and having an indoor tailgate party serving plenty of food.
“In my household, I do all the Super Bowl cooking,” Oberg said. “My wife doesn’t leave the TV set for a nanosecond.”
Culinary arts teacher Adina Salmansohn from Lincolnshire brought food and recipes from the last five decades for Oberg and participants to try.
“A Super Bowl party is a real cultural phenomenon,” Salmansohn said. “It’s an anthropological study of America.”
For Super Bowl parties in the 1970s, it was chili, which Oberg still makes today.
“And they did weird things with cheese,” Salmansohn said, and made hot dogs embedded in bread.
Americans “had an obsession with molded gelatin things,” including salmon mousse, which she brought to the event along with the recipe. In the 1980s, Americans dove into seven-layer Mexican salads and finger foods. In the 1990s “we went fat-free,” Salmansohn said.
Rice cakes could be found at Super Bowl parties in the early 1990s, she said, adding that party-goers would put cheese on top of the cakes, defeating the purpose. It was also the era of 6-foot-long submarine sandwiches.
More Top Picks Best Kettle With Thermometer Tested For Temperature Accuracy
In the 2000s, cupcakes and gourmet burgers dominated Super Bowl, she said. By 2014, American party-goers fancied chicken wings, guacamole and delivery pizza.
For this year’s Super Bowl feast, Americans will serve hummus, snack cracker mixes, monkey pizza bread and craft beer, Salmansohn said.
She demonstrated a quick way to make monkey pizza bread by chopping up green peppers, onions and pepperoni, layering that atop sauce on half of a rolled-out pizza dough. Then she folded over the dough, cut it up into bite-sized pieces and put it in the oven.
“You can use home-made dough or store-bought dough,” she said.
Masako Otani, who came to the event with her fiance, Robb Gibson, was happy to learn what she’s brining to a Super Bowl party is trendy.
“I’m bringing a Chex mix with peanut butter,” said Otani, of Schaumburg. “Everybody loves it. It’s so tasty. They can’t stop eating it.”
Gibson is taking the easy way out. He said he will pick up snacks such as chicken wings and onion rings to bring to the party.
No matter what he eats, Gibson said, “It’s going to be a huge event. The Super Bowl is great because you can have a celebration a month after New Year’s and you’re right smack dab in the middle of winter. You watch all the crazy commercials and talk about it at work the next day.”
Sheryl DeVore is a freelancer for the News-Sun.