Fried Chicken by John T. Edge Page A

Trillin’s New Yorker essay “An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing.”
    To further get myself in the proper frame of mind, I read each while seated at a bar near my Oxford, Mississippi, home, swilling drafts and snarfing down wing after spicy wing. I ate the chicken in a rather halfhearted stab at research, while I drank the beer to cool the fire and brighten my mood; for I did not begin my examination of Buffalo chicken wings eagerly.
    I tried my best to avoid the subject of Buffalo chicken wings. I even pondered a polemic in favor of restoring the beef-on-weck sandwich to its rightful stature as the region’s signature food. The genesis of my plaint was multifaceted. Blame media and menu saturation. Blame my tendency to embrace the singular, the fleeting: to deify the whale-blubber-fried chicken that I have not yet tasted but have heard tell is cooked on the occasion of a full moon, on an oil derrick that straddles the Bering Strait.
    But how could I deny that, based upon the parameters set for this book, Buffalo wings are an iconic example of fried chicken? They have a bone. (Flats even have two.) They attain their crunch by way of immersion in roiling oil. And a hell of a lot of people know them as the quintessential bar food.
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    so it is that I find myself in Buffalo, thinking big thoughts like, Who has the right to declare any city to be a capital of anything? By my reckoning, it’s an enterprise best left to historians backed by a retinue of fierce graduate students, chamber of commerce types absent any sense of propriety, or interlopers like me equipped with nothing save a bit of perspective. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that, thirty minutes into my Buffalo expedition, I make the bold decision to enshrine this post-industrial city—along with Nashville, Tennessee, and Kansas City, Missouri (about which you will learn more in succeeding chapters)—in my pantheon of fried chicken capitals.
    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.