The Reason We Always Pair Celery And Blue Cheese With Wings
Who doesn't love spicy, crisp chicken wings served with a tangy blue cheese dip and crunchy celery? This classic appetizer, known in most places as buffalo chicken wings, has been a favorite of football watchers and bar-goers for decades.
What's fascinating about this combination of foods is the backstory. The three foods were combined because of a simple request from a son for a late night snack. According to Time, in 1964, Teressa Bellissimo, owner of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, along with her husband, Frank, invented this classic appetizer. Their son, Dominic, was tending bar, and a group of his hungry friends descended late one night. Dominic asked his mom for something to feed them. And Teressa invented Buffalo Wings right on the spot with what she had on hand, including leftover celery and the house blue cheese sauce. It's fascinating to know that, up until that point, chicken wings were mostly used to make stock, according to Anchor Bar.
But why has this combo persisted? What is it about chicken wings, blue cheese, and celery that's so delicious? The answer is both simple and complicated.
Taste, texture, and the Scoville Scale
This appetizer is comprised of fried chicken wings coated in hot sauce, served with cold and creamy blue cheese dressing and crunchy, cool celery sticks. Your mouth is watering already, right? That's because the best food combinations always have variations in taste, aroma, texture, and temperature, along with visual appeal, per KHNI. And this appetizer delivers on all counts. The sensations of hot, cold, cool, chewy, creamy, crisp, tangy, mild, and crunchy hit all the feels.
Then there's something called the Scoville Scale, which is a measure of how spicy foods are, according to, well, Scoville Scale. Chili peppers are hot because they contain a compound called capsaicin, explains Pepper Geek, that registers as pain on your tongue. The number of Scoville units in hot sauce ranges from 2500 to 5000, per Pepper Geek. That's considered "mild hot" on the Scale, which goes up to 1.5 million units! Still, it's spicy to most people. And while some spiciness is desirable, that sensation can become overwhelming, especially if you're stuffing hot wings in your face.
That's where the blue cheese sauce comes in. One of the best ways to mute the spiciness of a chili pepper is with dairy, which coats the tongue and interrupts the connection of capsaicin and taste buds. And the ingredients in that blue cheese sauce include blue cheese (obvs), sour cream, and milk.
Get the original or make a homemade version
So, how do you get this appetizer in front of you as quickly as possible? Well, if you live in New York, Texas, Maryland, Ohio, or Georgia, you're in luck. You can visit the original Anchor Bar in Buffalo, or stop in at one of the franchise outlets. (If you do, be advised that this appetizer isn't called "Buffalo Wings" there. It's simply "wings," or "Anchor Bar chicken wings.") The city of Buffalo even has a Buffalo Wing Festival, with an eating contest and bobbing for wings, if that's your thing.
But if you aren't near an Anchor bar outlet, you can make homemade buffalo wings, too. There are thousands of variations to try. (You can even serve them with ranch dressing instead of blue cheese, if you like.) You can make air fryer buffalo wings for a lower fat content, make slow cooker buffalo wings with an oven finish, or even toss your wings on the grill. There are also boneless wing recipes (actually made from chicken tenders), and you can even use ... tofu?
By the way, Frank's hot sauce, which many recipes call for, wasn't invented by Frank Bellissimo, but by Adam Estilette and Jacob Frank in Louisiana, per Frank's Red Hot. The lore only goes so far, right?