The Tailgate

The tailgate is the meal cooked and eaten from the open rear of a vehicle in the car parks around a football ground, before and sometimes after the game. It belongs to the American autumn and is strongest in the South, the Midwest and the Plains, where college football holds a place in the calendar close to that of a feast day. The sources behind this entry do not fix a date or a ground for its beginning, and the entry makes no claim to one; it rests on the American habit of the outdoor, portable, shared meal, and on the recipes that habit produced.

The tailgate is an institution of the American table because it moves the dining room into a car park and keeps its manners. The host brings the food, the neighbours bring theirs, and a stranger parked alongside is fed as a matter of course. In this it is kin to the church supper and the potluck, though it answers to a different clock: the kick-off fixes the hour, and everything must be cooked, carried and eaten before it. The cooking is shaped by the limits of the site. There is a charcoal kettle grill or a gas burner, a cool box, a folding table and no kitchen. Dishes that survive these conditions are the ones that dominate: sausages, bratwurst, hamburgers and chicken pieces cooked over coals, pulled pork or brisket brought in already smoked and reheated, and chilli or stew held hot in a heavy pot. America's Test Kitchen — The America's Test Kitchen Cookbook supplies the discipline behind such food, in the tested grilling of burgers and chicken, the pot of chilli built in stages, and the dips, wings and salads that can be made ahead and carried cold. Make-ahead is the governing principle. A cook who has seasoned the meat the night before, cooked the beans at home and packed the sauces in sealed containers has done the hard work in a kitchen with proper tools. What remains at the grill is fire management and timing. Chicken wings, for example, are best part-cooked indoors and finished over a hot fire for colour, so that the car park has to supply only char. Food safety governs the form as much as taste. Raw meat must be kept apart from cooked food and from anything eaten raw, cold dishes held at or below 5°C (41°F), and hot dishes kept above 60°C (140°F). Poultry is cooked to an internal temperature of 74°C (165°F) and ground beef to 71°C (160°F), and a probe thermometer is a more reliable judge than the eye. A cool box packed with ice, and kept shut and in the shade, is the working refrigerator of the whole occasion. The regional character of the tailgate comes from what each place already cooks. Southern grounds smell of smoked pork and pimento cheese, the Midwest of bratwurst and beer, and the cities of the North-East of sausage and peppers. Each community brings its own dishes into the common field, and the meal is a record of local habit as much as of the game.

The flavour of the tailgate is the flavour of smoke, char and salt, backed by sharp, cold and sour things that cut the fat: pickles, slaw, mustard and vinegar-based sauces. Spiced chilli, buffalo-style wings and sweet barbecue glazes are the usual notes, and beer is the usual drink. Food that tastes right in cold air is hot, well seasoned and generous in fat.