Fried Chicken (12 page)

This insight comes to me as I pilot my rental car down a wide Buffalo boulevard, alternately digging into a box of medium-hot wings and wiping excess sauce on my jeans. I pass Duff's, a onetime Mexican restaurant that switched over from tacos to wings long ago; two Chinese buffeterias that boast strong sub-specialties in teriyaki and barbecue wings; a sandwich shop that, based upon the special that blinks forth from tonight's menu board, may well do the same; and a hospital which, in seeming anticipation of the dawning of the age of the Buffalo chicken wing, installed the first cardiac pacemaker implant in 1960.

When I stop at a traffic light, a Ford with a Domino's Pizza sign fixed to the roof pulls alongside. It is driven by a kid who—and I swear this is gospel—flicks a wing out his window, watches as it bounces off the blacktop, dabs sauce from his lips with the sleeve of his uniform, and, as the light changes to green, speeds away. Soon after I recover enough to proceed, I look up to see a restaurant sign looming in the distance. The place is called Just Pizza, but even these good folks can't leave well enough alone. According to the advertisements blazoned on the front window, they sell wings too.

By the time I reach the Anchor Bar, I have passed more than a dozen chicken wing vendors. I stopped at three, of which Duff's is my current favorite, if only because they are generous with their blue cheese dressing. I remind myself that I have much further to go, that I'm only at the Anchor Bar to set a sort of baseline for my study of Buffalo wings. But two steps into the vestibule and I'm a goner. Truth be told, I am predisposed to like any place that stakes its reputation for great music on the vocal stylings of a woman named Miss Dodo Greene. What's more, I did not anticipate the import of treading the same duckboards where a dish was conceived.

Imagine finding the first baker of apple pie. She's been dead for centuries. How about the first cook to stuff a broiled meat patty between two slices of bread? True believers will still be squabbling over the inventor of the hamburger when the Southern Baptist Convention elects its first openly gay leader. But here, at the 1940 vintage Anchor Bar, a vaguely Italianate warehouse on a forlorn street south of downtown, one can pull up a stool, order a beer, and pay homage to the maker amidst the trappings of a true cathedral of creation.

 

 

 

i did not arrive in Buffalo unawares. My readings, and forty years of pop acculturation, had equipped me with the basics, the tenets of the chicken wing catechism as handed down by the Bellissimo family, longtime proprietors of the Anchor Bar. I knew that, among aficionados, there is little to no squabbling over the year, 1964, in which Buffalo chicken wings were conceived. But I also knew that devotees tell a number of contradictory stories of the evening in question. The two most often cited are these:

• ■ Teressa Bellissimo invented Buffalo chicken wings when her son Dominic and a cadre of friends came by the bar in search of a late-night snack. Teressa rescued a mess of wings intended for the stockpot, cut them in half, cooked them to a crisp, and sprinkled the wings with hot sauce before serving them with a bowl of blue cheese dressing and a few strips of celery swiped from an antipasto platter.
  
• ■ The impetus was the Catholic prohibition against eating meat on Friday. As the clock inched toward midnight on a Friday, Dominic asked his mother to prepare something special for the Saturday-morning revelers. Again she crisped said wings and swiped said celery and added a monkey bowl of blue cheese for good measure.
  

 

I also knew that there exists an heretical story that does not involve Teressa Bellissimo. Among certain hard-shell Anchor Bar devotees, the claim of primacy by John Young, onetime proprietor of a Buffalo take-away shop called Wings 'n' Things, stirs the same sort of ire that tales of Sally Hemings's lineage precipitate among myopic descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

Many serious eaters dismiss his claim when they learn that Young neither clipped nor disjointed his wings, that he had the audacity to batter them before frying, and that his hot sauce (known to patrons as mambo sauce) was based upon a honey-mustard-cayenne mix instead of a margarine-cayenne blend. Those inconsistencies did not stop me, however, from driving seventy-five miles from Buffalo to Rochester, searching for an analogue to Wings 'n' Things in the locally revered mini-chain known as Sal's Birdland. What's more, Young's tale later compelled a visit to Washington, D.C., where Buffalo newspaperwoman Janice Okun reported that Young got the idea for mambo sauce. To this day, D.C. take-aways like Yum's serve mambo-drenched wings to the demimonde. But I digressed then, and I digress now.

 

 

 

the decor of the Anchor Bar calls to mind an
Antiques
Roadshow
prop room overseen by a drunk with impeccable taste in late-twentieth-century detritus. Unlike bars where the manager hangs a red wagon and a rusted Coca-Cola sign from the ceiling in an attempt to create what his franchise manual terms “a mood,” the Anchor Bar comes by it honestly with castoff softball trophies, Statue of Liberty sculptures, crab traps, and out-of-state license plates.

Ivano Toscano occupies a stool in the corner. He is a pug of a man, a first-generation immigrant who was born in Italy and made his way here after falling for a Yugoslavian beauty he met at a nudist beach. Ivano wears a watch fashioned from gold nuggets; his shirt pocket sports a cellophane-wrapped cigar. With the death of Frank and Teressa Bellisimo and the retirement of subsequent Anchor Bar scions, he is the majordomo of wingdom.

We shake hands, and I brace for the onslaught. I expect Ivano to loose a harangue on the virtues of Anchor Bar chicken wings. But he is mercifully free of any predilection to speechify, and I don't risk my luck by prodding.

Instead, I follow his lead and order a beer. And then another. We talk of chicken wings now and again, but we also talk of politics and women and baseball. It's late afternoon, and the pace of the bar quickens. Ivano watches the door, and I watch the crowd, my eyes alert, my pen at the ready. I'm intent upon recording for posterity one of those vignettes which, in the retelling, allow a writer to encapsulate the whole of an experience.

No such vignettes present themselves. I order a basket of hot wings. And I ponder a number of questions:
Is this the first food of mass appeal invented in the television age? Is this the sole dish of the twentieth century that has its origins in offal?
But I do not break the spell by asking these questions of Ivan. Instead, I eat my basket of hot wings. The vapors swirling upward from the pile tickle and then inflame my nostrils. The wings taste no better, no worse, than any of the others I will eat over the next few days.

Ivano and I order another beer. High on the barback, I spy a miniature chicken bucket filled with the plastic chits and playing cards necessary to play a round of what was once heralded as the country's newest game sensation, the Buffalo-Style Chicken Game. Behind me, I hear one fellow exclaim to his barmate, “Hey, that guy has a pad and pen—I wonder if he works for the TV station.” On the far wall, I glimpse an oil portrait of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

When I rise to depart for the bathroom, Ivano stands too. He has caught sight of a development that requires his attention. In his left hand he now holds a cordless power drill, outfitted with a Phillips-head screwdriver. A man walks toward him, bearing a Wisconsin license plate. The man is positively radiant. He appears to be a pilgrim like me, overjoyed at the prospect of being in the very spot where the chicken wing was invented. On second thought, maybe, like me, he's just drunk. I cannot understand a word he says, but Ivano can. And as the man prattles on in Italian, Ivano screws his car tag to a place of honor alongside the waitress station.

 

 

if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then what are we to make of the culinary riff?

I'm thinking of dishes that, in their naming, in their construction, in their reason for being, tip a metaphorical hat to the first man or woman to slather marshmallow fluff between two cookies, cover the sandwich in a vanilla fondant, and pronounce the resulting confection to be a Moon Pie. I'm thinking of dishes that pay sly homage to the creator of the corn dog by way of a stick-mounted lobe of foie gras, encased in a cornmeal jacket and served with a chalice of cherries jubilee.

When I think of poultry riffs, I think of the deep-fried duck wings served with a sauce of fermented black beans and chilies at Le Zinc in lower Manhattan. More prosaically, if no less reverently, I think of the fried chicken that Union Square Café chef Michael Romano developed for its sister restaurant, Blue Smoke. I think of the time I spent in his kitchen as he summoned forth recollections of the chicken served at Gus's in Mason, Tennessee, as he doctored up batter until he got as close as New York palates will allow. Michael's recipe is on page 135, immediately following the story of Gus's and other Tennessee fryers of spicy birds.

THIRTEEN

The Bouglean Conceit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

something nags at me as I munch a capsicum-dusted breast at Mr. Boo's Fried Chicken in suburban Nashville, Tennessee. And it's not my cholesterol count. It's the story proprietor Diana Bouglea tells about how her chicken owes its heat to a pepper grown only in Poteet Parish, Louisiana. While she sketches a portrait of the plantation down south of I-10 to which the Bouglea family returns each August for the pepper harvest, I call forth a mental map of south Louisiana and begin ticking off parish names: La Fourche, Terrebone, Assumption, Iberville, Iberia, Vermilion. I know my list is just a start, but I swear I've never heard of Poteet.

I ask her to spell the parish name. I have it right. I ask again, just to be sure that my suspicion is not borne of faulty translation, and she points to the whiteboard above the counter where someone has scrawled, “Our business is all about the Bouglea pepper, grown on the Bouglea farm in Poteet Parish, Louisiana.” Instead of pressing the point, I take another bite of chicken, stifling a sneeze as my nose grazes the crisp, Bouglea-coated crust.

When I return to my car and unfold an official-issue Louisiana road map, I scan the list of parishes. There is no Poteet Parish. But instead of marching back in and demanding a correction, I chalk her subterfuge up to the curious state of affairs among Nashville's fryers of hot chicken. Such a geographic conceit is expected in a city where, after decades of dominance by Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, four challengers to the throne have emerged. They each tout their recipe as the one, true hot chicken.

 

 

 

i know, thanks to my recent trip, that Buffalo, New York, is a self-aware citadel of fried chicken cookery. But central and west-central Tennessee, home to the metropolis of Nashville and the village of Mason, appear to be places where distinct styles of fried chicken have developed, but, until very recently, no one made proclamations of greatness.