A good sports bar needs three things: beer on tap, a television on the wall and a menu that offers Buffalo wings. Wings can be found at nearly every Super Bowl party and barbecue outing in the country, and they are the favored excuse of businessmen who want to visit Hooters. Yet the greasy, finger-staining bar-food staple is only 45 years old. On Sept. But how did the spicy snack come about? And why is it served with celery?
To kick off their search, the duo visited downtown Buffalo's Anchor Bar , where Buffalo wings were first created. Although Anchor Bar wasn't named the best place for wings in the video — Ro and Yzola crowned Duff's Famous Wings the winner — it's known as the birthplace of Buffalo wings. Ro and Yzola also spoke with Michelle Buchholz, the bar's marketing director, who explained the late-night origin of what is now one of America's most popular bar foods. However, according to Buchholz, only people from outside the city actually call them "Buffalo wings.
That same year, President Lyndon B. Their son Dominic also worked at the bar. Before they became a bar-food staple, chicken wings were traditionally only used to give flavor to stocks and broths. But Anchor Bar now has more than 15 other flavors on its menu as well, including Mild, Hotter, Barbeque, and "Suicidal. Radio Schedule. Buffalo Toronto Public Media. Show Search Search Query. Play Live Radio. Next Up:. This myth even goes so far as to identify the precise individual, a certain Teressa Bellissimo, proprietor of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY, who, in as the story goes first thought of serving chicken wings to bar patrons.
It's a pretty story. But the development of a cuisine is almost never the result of a single person having an idea, but rather, the result of slow and steady forces of history, culture, demographics and economics.
Indeed, the reality is that chicken wings as we currently eat them, including the spicy sauce, probably originated in Chicago, which through the early and middle part of the 20th century was the biggest meatpacking hub in North America. But the origins of chicken wings as food, as least in North America, is part of the long tradition of slow-cooking tougher cuts of meat and poultry and serving it with a spicy seasoning or sauce.
Also known as barbecue , this tradition is as old as America, and dates to the time of enslavement of African people, which means it originates in the South by way of the West Indies. Likewise the tradition of fried chicken, another mainstay of southern cooking which itself has its roots in West African cuisine. In the decades following the Civil War, millions of Black Americans moved from the south to the north in what's called the Great Migration, and brought their culinary traditions with them.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of this migration, which is commonly reckoned to have begun around , was the city of Chicago. Because it was the main meatpacking hub, Chicago offered plenty of jobs. Kansas City and St. Louis, which also had large meatpacking industries, were also major destinations of the Migration.
And since slaughterhouses had no use for chicken wings, to the point where they were literally discarded, and the people who brought their culinary traditions of barbecue and fried chicken from the south to the north applied these techniques and flavors to this plentiful ingredient. Thus it's the collision of these two forces—the massive migration of Black Americans to meatpacking cities like Chicago, Kansas City and St.
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