Just posted: “Hot wings on a paper plate”, about parodies of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”, but with a significant interlude into items of American popular culture, among them, those hot wings on a paper plate. I knew I’d mentioned the wings in several earlier postings, but as it turns out, just in passing. So now a note on hot wings, in their classic presentation in an Anerican fast food restaurant, on a paper plate.
From Wikipedia:
A Buffalo wing, in the cuisine of the United States, is an unbreaded chicken wing section (flat or drumette) that is generally deep-fried then coated or dipped in a sauce consisting of a vinegar-based cayenne pepper hot sauce and melted butter prior to serving The Buffalo wing was invented in 1964 at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York by Teressa Bellissimo. [I generally reserve judgments on origin stories, so I’ll let this stand, though obviously there must be some Buffalo connection.] They are traditionally served hot, along with celery sticks and carrot sticks with blue cheese dressing or, primarily outside of New York, ranch dressing for dipping.
From the How to Feed a Loon site on “classic Buffalo chicken wings” (with a recipe, of course):
The attraction of the dish lies in the contrast beween hot and cool — between hot in temperature (deep-fried) and hot in spiciness (the cayenne pepper), on the one hand; and cool in taste, in a variety of senses (the crispness of the chilled celery sticks, the creamy taste of blue cheese or ranch dressing), on the other.
You could think of it as a working-class nod to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1964) volume The Raw and the Cooked. In this case, the cooked versus the raw.
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