Wings

For most of American culinary history, the chicken wing was a throwaway. Butchers sold wings for soup stock, if they sold them at all. The wing was cheap because it was considered to have no real eating value. The drumstick and the breast were the cuts worth selling. The wing sat at the bottom of the hierarchy.

This changed on the night of March fourth, nineteen sixty-four, at the Anchor Bar on Main Street in Buffalo.

The Anchor Bar had been operating since nineteen thirty-five, when Sicilian immigrants Frank and Teressa Bellissimo opened it near the Lake Erie waterfront. On that March night, according to the story told by the family and documented by food historians, Dominic Bellissimo was tending bar when a group of his friends arrived hungry late in the evening. He asked his mother Teressa to make something fast. She had chicken wings in the kitchen, destined for soup stock. She deep-fried them instead, tossed them in a sauce she improvised from cayenne pepper and vinegar base blended with butter, and put them out.

The sauce was not a recipe she had made before. It became, over the following years, one of the most replicated flavors in American food.

Teressa Bellissimo died in November of nineteen eighty-five at eighty-four years old, in the apartment above the bar. By then the wing had already escaped Buffalo and was spreading through every sports bar, every pub, every concession stand in America. Reports have put American wing consumption at more than twenty-seven billion wings in a single year.

The city of Buffalo declared July twenty-ninth to be Chicken Wing Day. The Anchor Bar is still open on Main Street. The wings are still made with the sauce.