Fried Chicken by John T. Edge Page B

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.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    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