Cover image for Title

Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces

CALVIN TRILLIN

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing

Eating with the Pilgrims

Stalking the Barbecued Mutton

Just Try It

Talk About Ugly

Missing Links

Wonton Lust

The Magic Bagel

Killer Bagels

Don’t Mention It

Where’s Chang?

What Happened to Brie and Chablis?

PENGUIN BOOKS — GREAT FOOD

Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces

CALVIN TRILLIN (1935– ) is an American journalist, humorist and novelist. Born in Missouri, he joined the New Yorker in 1963. His reporting there has concentrated on America, between the coasts. For fifteen years, he produced an article from somewhere in the country every three weeks, on subjects that ranged from the murder of a farmer’s wife in Iowa to the author’s efforts to write the definitive history of a Louisiana restaurant called Didee’s ‘or to eat an awful lot of baked duck and dirty rice trying’.

Sources

‘An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing’, copyright © 1980 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Eating With the Pilgrims’, copyright © 1981 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The Nation. ‘Stalking the Barbecued Mutton’, copyright © 1977 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Just Try It’, copyright © 1982 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Talk About Ugly’, copyright © 1990 by Calvin Trillin, originally published through King Features Syndicate. ‘Missing Links’, copyright © 2002 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Lo Mein Lust’, copyright © 1996 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared The New Yorker. ‘The Magic Bagel’, copyright © 2000 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Killer Bagels’, copyright © 1996 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Don’t Mention It’, copyright © 2002 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘Where’s Chang?’, copyright © 2010 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker. ‘What’s Happening to Brie and Chablis?’, copyright © 2003 by Calvin Trillin, originally appeared in The New Yorker.

An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing

I did not truly appreciate the difficulties historians must face regularly in the course of their research until I began trying to compile a short history of the Buffalo chicken wing. Since Buffalo chicken wings were invented in the recent past, I had figured that I would have an easy task compared to, say, medievalists whose specialty requires them to poke around in thirteenth-century Spain and is not even edible. My wife, Alice, I must say, was unenthusiastic about the project from the start. It may be that she thought my interest in pure research could lead me into searching out the origins of just about any local specialty I might contemplate eating too much of – how the cheesesteak got to Philadelphia, for instance, or why Tucson is the center of interest in a Mexican dish called chimichanga, or how people in Saginaw came to begin eating chopped-peanuts-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, or why a restaurant I once visited in the market area of Pittsburgh serves sandwiches and french fries with the french fries inside the sandwiches. I assured her that I had no intention of extending my inquiries as far as chopped peanuts or interior french fries, although I couldn’t fail to point out that she had, in a manner of speaking, expressed some curiosity about the Pittsburgh sandwich herself (‘Why in the world would anybody do such a thing?’).

I saw the history of the Buffalo chicken wing as a straightforward exercise, unencumbered by the scrambled folk myth that by now must be part of the trimmings of something like the Philadelphia cheesesteak. There happens to be extant documentation identifying the inventor of Buffalo chicken wings as the late Frank Bellissimo, who was the founder of the Anchor Bar, on Main Street – the form of the documentation being an official proclamation from the City of Buffalo declaring July 29, 1977, Chicken Wing Day. (‘WHEREAS, the success of Mr. Bellissimo’s tasty experiment in 1964 has grown to the point where thousands of pounds of chicken wings are consumed by Buffalonians in restaurants and taverns throughout our city each week …’) I would not even have to rummage through some dusty archive for the document; the Anchor Bar has a copy of it laminated on the back of the dinner menu.

I had the further advantage of having access to what people in the history game call ‘contemporary observers’ – a crowd of serious chicken-wing eaters right on the scene. A college friend of mine, Leonard Katz, happens to be a Buffalonian – a native Buffalonian, in fact, who became a dean at the medical school of the State University of New York at Buffalo. I have also known his wife, Judy, since long before the invention of the chicken wing. She is not a native Buffalonian, but she carries the special credentials that go with having been raised in New Haven, a city that claims to have been the scene of the invention of two other American specialties – the hamburger and the American pizza. Although Leonard Katz normally limits his chicken-wing consumption to downing a few as hors d’oeuvres – a policy, he assured me, that has no connection at all with the fact that his medical specialty is the gastrointestinal tract – the rest of the family think nothing of making an entire meal out of them. Not long before I arrived in Buffalo for my field work, Linda Katz had returned from her freshman year at Washington University, in St. Louis – a city where, for reasons I do not intend to pursue, the local specialty is toasted ravioli – and headed straight for her favorite chicken-wing outlet to repair a four-month deprivation. A friend of Linda’s who returned from the University of Michigan at about the same time had eaten chicken wings for dinner four nights in a row before she felt fit to carry on. Judy Katz told me that she herself eats chicken wings not only for dinner but, every now and then, for breakfast – a pattern of behavior that I think qualifies her as being somewhere between a contemporary observer and a fanatic.

On my first evening in Buffalo, the Katz family and some other contemporary observers of their acquaintance took me on a tour of what they considered a few appropriate chicken-wing sources – out of what is said to be several hundred places in the area where Buffalonians can order what they usually refer to simply as ‘wings’ – so that I could make some preliminary research notes for later analysis. The tour naturally included the Anchor Bar, where celebrated visitors to Buffalo – say, a daughter of the Vice-President – are now taken as a matter of course, the way they are driven out to see Niagara Falls. It also included a noted chicken-wing center called Duffs and a couple of places that serve beef-on-weck – a beef sandwich on a salty roll – which happens to be the local specialty that was replaced in the hearts of true Buffalonians by chicken wings. In Buffalo, chicken wings are always offered ‘mild’ or ‘medium’ or ‘hot’, depending on how much of a dose of hot sauce they have been subjected to during preparation, and they are always accompanied by celery and blue-cheese dressing. I sampled mild. I sampled medium. I sampled hot. It turned out that there is no sort of chicken wing I don’t like. As is traditional, I washed down the wings with a number of bottles of Genesee or Molson – particularly when I was sampling the hot. I ate celery between chicken wings. I dipped the celery into the blue-cheese dressing. I dipped chicken wings into the blue-cheese dressing. (I learned later that nobody in Buffalo has figured out for sure what to do with the blue-cheese dressing.) I tried a beef-on-weck, just for old times sake. I found that I needed another order of hot, plus another bottle of Molson. After four hours, the tour finally ended with Judy Katz apologizing for the fact that we were too late for her favorite chicken-wing place, a pizza parlor called Santora’s, which closes at 1:00 A.M.

The next morning, I got out my preliminary research notes for analysis. They amounted to three sentences I was unable to make out, plus what appeared to be a chicken-wing stain. I showed the stain to Judy Katz. ‘Medium?’ I asked.

‘Medium or hot,’ she said.

* * *

Fortunately, the actual moment that Buffalo chicken wings were invented has been described many times by Frank Bellissimo and his son, Dom, with the sort of rich detail that any historian would value; unfortunately, they used different details. According to the account Frank Bellissimo often gave over the years, the invention of the Buffalo chicken wing came about because of a mistake – the delivery of some chicken wings instead of the backs and necks that were ordinarily used in making spaghetti sauce. Frank Bellissimo thought it was a shame to use the wings for sauce. ‘They were looking at you, like saying, “I don’t belong in the sauce,’’ ’ he often recalled. He implored his wife, who was doing the cooking, to figure out some more dignified end for the wings. Teressa Bellissimo, presumably moved by her husband’s plea, decided to make the wings into some hors d’oeuvres for the bar – and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

Dom Bellissimo is a short, effusive man who now acts as the bustling host of the Anchor Bar; his friends sometimes call him Rooster. He told me a story that did not include a mistaken delivery or, for that matter, Frank Bellissimo. According to Dom, it was late on a Friday night in 1964, a time when Roman Catholics still confined themselves to fish and vegetables on Friday. He was tending the bar. Some regulars had been spending a lot of money, and Dom asked his mother to make something special to pass around gratis at the stroke of midnight. Teressa Bellissimo picked up some chicken wings – parts of a chicken that most people do not consider even good enough to give away to barflies – and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

According to both accounts, Teressa Bellissimo cut off and discarded the small appendage on a chicken wing that looks as if it might have been a mistake in the first place, chopped the remainder of each wing in half, and served two straight sections that the regulars at the bar could eat with their fingers. (The two straight pieces, one of which looks like a miniature drumstick and is known locally as a drumette, became one of the major characteristics of the dish; in Buffalo, a plate of wings does not look like a plate of wings but like an order of fried chicken that has, for some reason, been reduced drastically in scale.) She deep-fried them (or maybe ‘bake-barbecued’ them), applied some hot sauce, and served them on a plate that included some celery from the Anchor Bar’s regular antipasto and some of the blue-cheese dressing normally used as the house dressing for salads. If the regulars were puzzled about what to do with the blue-cheese dressing, they were presumably too grateful to say so.

The accounts of Dom and Frank also agree that the wings were an immediate success – famous throughout Buffalo within weeks. In the clipping libraries of the Buffalo newspapers, I could find only one article that dealt with the Bellissimo family and their restaurant in that period – a long piece on Frank and Teressa in the Courier-Express in 1969, five years after the invention of the chicken wing. It talks a lot about the musicians who appeared at the Bellissimo’s restaurant over the years and about the entertainers who used to drop in after road shows. It mentions the custom Teressa and Frank had in times gone by of offering a few songs themselves late on a Saturday night – Teressa emerging from behind the pasta pots in the kitchen to belt out ‘Oh Marie’ or ‘Tell Me That You Love Me’. It does not mention chicken wings.

Maybe Dom and Frank Bellissimo got fuzzy on dates after some time passed. By chance, my most trusted contemporary observers, the Katzes, were living out of the city during the crucial period; Linda Katz looked surprised to hear that there had ever been a time when people did not eat chicken wings. The exact date of the discovery seemed a small matter, though, compared to the central historical fact that, whatever the circumstances, the first plate of Buffalo chicken wings emerged from the kitchen of the Anchor Bar. It seemed to me that if a pack of revisionist historians descended on Buffalo, itching to get their hands on some piece of conventional wisdom to refute, they would have no serious quarrel with the basic story of how the Buffalo chicken wing was invented – although the feminists among them might point out that the City of Buffalo’s proclamation would have been more accurate if it had named as the inventor Teressa Bellissimo. The inventor of the airplane, after all, was not the person who told Wilbur and Orville Wright that it might be nice to have a machine that could fly.

* * *

‘A blue-collar dish for a blue-collar town’, one of the Buffalonians who joined the Katz family and me on our chicken-wing tour said, reminding me that an historian is obligated to put events in the context of their setting, even if his mouth happens to be full at the time. Buffalo does have the reputation of being a blue-collar town – a blue-collar town that during the winter is permanently New York Times