Believe it or not, football season is almost here! Meaning “chicken wing” demand will rapidly start to increase. During the Super Bowl game alone last year, it is estimated that Americans ate 1.45 billion chicken wings. What’s even more crazy is how chicken wings became America’s favorite finger food. Below is a brief history…
The story that most Americans are familiar with starts in 1964 with Teressa Bellissimo, co-owner of “Anchor Bar” in Buffalo, New York. There are two variations of how Bellissimo ended up creating the classic buffalo-style chicken wings we all know and love today. Bellissimo’s husband Frank recounted that a shipment of wings was received by Anchor Bar by mistake. According to Frank, she created the dish – along with a spicy sauce, a side of blue cheese, and celery – while trying to figure out what to do with the wings.
Bellissimo’s son, Dominic, tells a slightly different version of the story. He was tending bar one night in 1964 and some of his buddies were there drinking. It was approaching midnight when he asked if his friends could get something to eat. His mother took some chicken wings that normally would have been used for soup broth, deep-fried them, and doused them in a secret sauce, and served them with the staple blue cheese dressing and celery. According to Dominic, his friends were blown away and his mother put them on the menu the next day.
About a mile from Anchor Bar, a restaurant called “John Young’s Wings ’n Things” also sold chicken wings with a spicy, tomato-based sauce. According to Young, his version of Buffalo wings first appeared on the menu in 1963. Young’s restaurant was known for its wings that were fried whole and topped with “mumbo” sauce, a spicy tomato-based condiment that has roots in Chicago.
According to Young’s wife, he was friends with Bellissimo’s husband Frank, who might have eaten the wings and passed the idea on. Young left Buffalo in the late 1960s and when he returned to Buffalo more than a decade later, Wings ’n Things was long gone and Anchor Bar was well established as the creators of Buffalo wings.
Unlike Young’s wings, the Anchor Bar’s chicken wings were fried then broken into pieces, and tossed in hot sauce. It is this recipe, along with the quintessential side of blue cheese dressing and celery, that today’s Buffalo wings most closely resemble.
The Bellisimos can credit their son for helping their recipe rise to the top. Dominic, along with another employee at the bar, went on the road to promote the wings and sell their secret sauce. Bar owners especially liked the idea because the spicy/salty wings also tended to raise beer sales!
Buffalo-style chicken wings were mostly just a regional specialty around the New York area until the mid-1980 when they suddenly took off and spread across the country. This was in part helped by the rise of sports bars. Wings were a great group food as they are both shareable and affordable. And because football is the most popular sporting event to watch with friends in bars, wings and football have been closely associated ever since.
By the 1990s, fast food giants McDonald’s and KFC had added their own varieties of wings to their menus, which helped turn chicken wings to one of America’s best-selling proteins. And that popularity has also lifted wing prices from as low as 30 cents a pound back in the 1980s to an average of around $2.00 or more per pound over the last five years. However, heading into the Super Bowl every year, wings tend to jump +50 cents or more per pound. It always seems crazy when we look back on how many of our most popular trends and fads came about. (Sources: Americas Test Kitchen, Agrilife Today, Time)
