Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  I saw an example of Brooks’s vision on a visit to Fishers Island, where Osinski buys the seed oysters that he plants in cages in his underwater plot. The Fishers Island Oyster Company is run by Steve Malinowski, an aqua-entrepreneur who has managed to raise five children while working on the water. Eight years ago, he began a nursery to ensure that he wouldn’t wake up and discover he had no oysters. Today, Malinowski produces so many seed oysters—about five million a year—that he sells some to other shellfish farmers. But there has been some tension. Two years ago, Manhattan’s top restaurants always offered at least one oyster from Long Island Sound: Fishers Islands, delivered by UPS the day after being harvested. Lately, you saw another: Widow’s Holes, delivered by Osinski on the day he’d pulled them out of the water. “It’s an interesting dilemma, to visit restaurants and find Mike Osinski’s oysters grown from our seeds,” Malinowski told me. “We want our buyers to succeed, but maybe not succeed too well.”

  Malinowski runs the only hatchery on the island, having acquired Ocean Pond Oyster Company. Ocean Pond was started in 1962, after Carey Matthiessen and his brother, the writer Peter Matthiessen, discovered that a seldom visited local pond was full of shellfish. (They’d dragged up an abandoned boat, found it was covered with oysters, and concluded that oysters had been there since the 1938 hurricane blew open a passage to the sea, and the pond, previously freshwater, had become brackish.) Oysters grow well in brackish water because their natural predators can’t find them there. Brackish oysters don’t have much flavor—“They were big, but bland,” according to Carey Matthiessen—and, when mature, are moved to the sea to acquire that crisp salinity that gets the saliva going. But the pond was perfect for baby oysters—a low-salinity incubator.

  I visited the hatchery: bubbling green vats of phytoplankton (a bivalve’s dinner) and gallons of seawater heated to the temperature of early summer—an oyster’s honeymoon suite. Oysters like warm water—they reproduce when it reaches seventy degrees, and at that time, according to Osinski, “they’re not to be eaten because they taste of gonads.” (Thus the caution against eating oysters during the “r”-less summer months—“Nobody likes shells full of sex.”) In normal conditions, a male spews billions of sperm in the proximity of a female, who then releases millions of eggs—most of which never meet in the topsy-turvy open sea. But in a temperature-controlled tank the process is more efficient, and you need only a few romantic “brood” oysters to produce a few million offspring.

  Malinowski introduced me to six brooders. I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls, but with oysters it doesn’t always matter. Oysters are not just hermaphrodite, as some people believe. They’re protandrous: capable of alternating their sex. “You’ve got no idea what you’re going to get,” Matthiessen told me. “One year, an oyster produces eggs. The next year, it could be sperm.” Oysters hibernate when the temperature drops below forty degrees and seem to lose their gender. “If you pull one out and open it up, its genitals are completely flat—they’re not one thing or the other.” And then it’s anybody’s guess what happens when they wake up.

  I studied the six shellfish. Not a lot seemed to be happening—six oysters having sex looked a lot like six oysters not having sex. Then I noticed a barely perceptible whitish stream issuing from one. Procreation had begun.

  Malinowski showed me an incubation tank with a swirling pink dust: three-day-old larvae, millions of them. Larvae become “spats,” which, sheltered, grow to maturity in Ocean Pond, until they’re big enough to be taken out to sea. Malinowski’s spot was just off one of the island’s peninsulas, looking out into the Sound.

  We went there in his boat, and he opened up an oyster and gave it to me.

  “You chew, don’t you?” I had to ask. The question flustered Malinowski—a large-boned, big-handed, rustic sort of fellow, gap-toothed, with a rugged face and a no-nonsense manner.

  “No one has ever asked me that before. What do you do?” (For a man who’d spent most of his life with oysters, he seemed remarkably uncertain about the etiquette.) He reflected. “Yes, I chew. I’ve always chewed. If you swallow, you can’t taste the oyster. If you swallow, all oysters are the same.”

  “How many times?”

  His jaws leaned left, then right, then left again. “Three times. I chew an oyster three times.”

  I tipped mine in, heart beating, gills working, and was struck by the liquid—both the amount (a lot) and its saltiness (also a lot). Widow’s Hole oysters are briny, but this one was brinier, even though both oysters came from the same seed. The difference was in where Malinowski’s had grown up—closer to the open sea. I chewed, once, twice, a third time. It was crunchy (which was curious, because there were no bones). Then, on the fifth chew, I got something I hadn’t tasted before: a sweetness.

  Malinowski grinned. “Yes, they say that’s what’s unique about our oysters. That sweetness that kicks in around your last chew.”

  Salt and sugar, briny and sweet, an evocation of air and clean water; the flavors of the oyster lingered as long as a minute. I asked for another and chewed it—twenty-two times—with relish.

  Recently, I was visited by a memory of a trip I took with my grandfather to an ice factory when I was five years old. It was August 1959: a hot, sultry Louisiana morning and a cold ice factory. My grandfather pulled up to a loading dock—unpaved, a bright-red Louisiana clay—and a man brought us a block of ice wrapped in straw. In the early morning, lots of people were buying blocks of ice wrapped in straw. My grandfather lived in a paper-mill town, and although he had a refrigerator (we’d be making hand-cranked ice cream), most homes still had iceboxes.

  The ice factory is gone and its passing is connected with what happened to oysters. My father never bought a block of ice. His was the first generation to enjoy refrigerated mass-market foods. His favorite was Salisbury steak, a factory-made meat that kept long enough to be shipped anywhere. An oyster can’t be eaten this way. It needs to be kept cool by ice, because it has to be eaten when it’s fresh. That’s how you eat oysters—before the ice melts. You have to chew to know the difference, Malinowski told me, which is another way of saying that the difference is everything. Osinski used the word terroir: in an oyster, as with wine, you should be able to taste the place it came from; in this still-living creature you will find the water and the food it ate—these living, fragile, handmade creatures tasting wonderfully of the health of the planet.

  2006

  “I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, then it became a moral choice, and now it’s just to annoy people.”

  “Captain, this Brie is totally out of control!”

  LOCAL DELICACIES

  “How’s the barbecue chicken?”

  “This is not the one I selected! I never forget a face!”

  AN ATTEMPT TO COMPILE A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BUFFALO CHICKEN WING

  CALVIN TRILLIN

  I did not appreciate the difficulties historians must face regularly in the course of their research until I began trying to compile a short history of the Buffalo chicken wing. Since Buffalo chicken wings were invented less than twenty years ago, I had figured that I would have an easy task compared to, say, a medievalist whose specialty requires him to poke around in thirteenth-century Spain. Also, there is extant documentation identifying the inventor of Buffalo chicken wings as Frank Bellissimo, founder of the Anchor Bar, on Main Street—the form of the documentation being an official proclamation from the City of Buffalo declaring July 29, 1977, Chicken Wing Day. (“WHEREAS, the success of Mr. Bellissimo’s tasty experiment in 1964 has grown to the point where thousands of pounds of chicken wings are consumed by Buffalonians in restaurants and taverns throughout our city each week…”) I would not even have to rummage through some dusty archive for the document; the Anchor Bar has a copy of it laminated on the back of the dinner menu. I had the further advantage of having access to what people in the history game call “contemporary observers”—a crowd of serious chicken-wing eaters right on the sce
ne. A college friend of mine, Leonard Katz, happens to be a Buffalonian—a native Buffalonian, in fact, who is now a dean at the medical school of the State University of New York at Buffalo. I have also known his wife, Judy, since long before the invention of the chicken wing. She is not a native Buffalonian, but she carries the special credentials that go with having been raised in New Haven, a city that claims to have been the scene of the invention of two other American specialties—the hamburger and the American pizza. Although Leonard Katz normally limits his chicken-wing consumption to downing a few as hors d’oeuvres—a policy, he assured me, that has no connection at all with the fact that his medical specialty is the gastrointestinal tract—the rest of the family think nothing of making an entire meal out of them. Not long before I arrived, Linda Katz had returned from her freshman year at Washington University, in St. Louis—a city where the unique local specialty is, for reasons lost to historians, toasted ravioli—and headed straight for her favorite chicken-wing outlet to repair a four-month deprivation. A friend of Linda’s who returned from the University of Michigan at about the same time had eaten chicken wings for dinner four nights in a row before she felt fit to continue. Judy Katz told me that she herself eats chicken wings not only for dinner but, every now and then, for breakfast—a pattern of behavior that I think qualifies her as being somewhere between a contemporary observer and a fanatic.

  Even a chicken-wing eater of Judy Katz’s seriousness could not have tested the full variety of Buffalo chicken wings. It is said that there are now several hundred places in the area where Buffalonians can order what they usually refer to simply as “wings”—including any number of places that also offer “a bucket of wings” to go. She has, however, obviously taken what is known in social science—a field whose methods are used increasingly by modern historians—as a fair sampling. On my first evening in Buffalo, the Katz family and some other contemporary observers of their acquaintance took me on a tour of what they considered a few appropriate chicken-wing sources so that I could make some preliminary research notes for later analysis. The tour naturally included the Anchor Bar, where celebrated visitors to Buffalo—Phyllis Newman, say, or Walter Mondale’s daughter—are now taken as a matter of course, the way they are driven out to see Niagara Falls. It also included a noted chicken-wing center called Duffs and a couple of places that serve beef-on-weck—a beef sandwich on a salty roll—which happens to be the local specialty that was replaced in the hearts of true Buffalonians by chicken wings. In Buffalo, chicken wings are always offered “mild” or “medium” or “hot,” depending on how much of a dose of hot sauce they have been subjected to during preparation, and are always accompanied by celery and blue-cheese dressing. I sampled mild. I sampled medium. I sampled hot. As is traditional, I washed them down with a number of bottles of Genesee or Molson—particularly while I was sampling the hot. I ate celery between chicken wings. I dipped the celery into the blue-cheese dressing. I dipped chicken wings into the blue-cheese dressing. I tried a beef-on-weck. I found that I needed another order of medium. After four hours, the tour finally ended with Judy Katz apologizing for the fact that we were too late for her favorite chicken-wing place, a pizza parlor called Santora’s, which closes at 1 A.M.

  The next morning, I got out my preliminary research notes for analysis. They amounted to three sentences I was unable to make out, plus what appeared to be a chicken-wing stain. I showed the stain to Judy Katz. “Medium?” I asked.

  “Medium or hot,” she said.

  Fortunately, the actual moment that Buffalo chicken wings were invented has been described by Frank Bellissimo and his son, Dom, with the sort of rich detail that any historian would value; unfortunately, they use different details. Frank Bellissimo is in his eighties now, and more or less retired; he and his wife, Teressa, are pretty much confined to an apartment above the Anchor Bar. According to the account he has given many times over the years, the invention of the Buffalo chicken wing came about because of a mistake—the delivery of some chicken wings instead of the backs and necks that were ordinarily used in making spaghetti sauce. Frank Bellissimo thought it was a shame to use the wings for sauce. “They were looking at you, like saying, ‘I don’t belong in the sauce,’” he has often recalled. He implored his wife, who was doing the cooking, to figure out some more dignified end for the wings. Teressa Bellissimo decided to make some hors d’oeuvres for the bar—and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

  Dom Bellissimo—a short, effusive man who now acts as the bustling host of the Anchor Bar—tells a story that does not include a mistaken delivery or, for that matter, Frank Bellissimo. According to Dom, it was late on a Friday night in 1964, a time when Roman Catholics still confined themselves to fish and vegetables on Fridays. He was tending the bar. Some regulars had been spending a lot of money, and Dom asked his mother to make something special to pass around gratis at the stroke of midnight. Teressa Bellissimo picked up some chicken wings—parts of a chicken that most people do not consider even good enough to give away to barflies—and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

  Dom and Frank agree that Teressa Bellissimo chopped each wing in half and served two straight sections that the regulars at the bar could eat with their fingers. (The two straight pieces, one of which looks like a miniature drumstick and is known locally as a drumette, became one of the major characteristics of the dish; in Buffalo, a plate of wings does not look like a plate of wings but like an order of fried chicken that has, for some reason, been reduced drastically in scale.) She “deep-fried” them, applied some hot sauce, and served them on a plate that included some celery from the Anchor Bar’s regular antipasto and some of the blue-cheese dressing normally used as the house dressing for salads. Dom and Frank also agree that the wings were an immediate success—famous throughout Buffalo within weeks. Before long, they say, chicken wings were on the dinner menu instead of being served gratis at the bar—and were beginning to nudge aside the Italian food that had always been the Anchor Bar’s specialty. In the clipping libraries of the Buffalo newspapers, I could find only one article that dealt with the Bellissimo family and their restaurant in that period—a long piece on Frank and Teressa in the Courier-Express in 1969, five years after the invention of the chicken wing. It talks a lot about the musicians who had appeared at the Bellissimos’ restaurant over the years and about the entertainers who used to drop in after road shows. It mentions the custom Teressa and Frank had in times gone by of offering a few songs themselves late on a Saturday night—Teressa emerging from the kitchen to belt out “Oh Marie” or “Tell Me that You Love Me.” It does not mention chicken wings. Perhaps the interviewer simply happened to be more interested in jazz drummers than tasty experiments. Perhaps Frank and Dom Bellissimo are, like most people, fuzzy on dates. By chance, my most trusted contemporary observers, the Katzes, were living out of the city during the crucial period; Linda Katz looked surprised to hear that there had ever been a time when people did not eat chicken wings. The exact date of the discovery seemed a small matter, though, compared to the central historical fact, common to both Bellissimo stories, that the first plate of Buffalo chicken wings emerged from the kitchen of the Anchor Bar. It seemed to me that if a pack of revisionist historians descended on Buffalo, itching to get their hands on some piece of conventional wisdom, they would have no serious quarrel with the basic story of how the Buffalo chicken wing was invented—although the feminists among them might point out that the City of Buffalo’s proclamation would have been more exact if it had named as the inventor Teressa Bellissimo. The inventor of the airplane, after all, was not the person who told Wilbur and Orville Wright that it might be nice to have a machine that could fly.

  “A blue-collar dish for a blue-collar town,” one of the Buffalonians who joined the Katz family and me on our chicken-wing tour said, reminding me that historians are obligated to put events in the context of their setting. Buffalo does have the reputation of being a blue-collar town and, particularly after the extraordinary w
inter in 1977, of being a blue-collar town permanently white with snow. Buffalonians who do much traveling have resigned themselves to the fact that the standard response to hearing that someone comes from Buffalo is a Polish joke or some line like “Has the snow melted yet?” Buffalo has always had a civic-morale problem. Could the problem have been exacerbated by making a local specialty out of a part of the chicken that somebody in San Francisco or Houston might throw away? Frank Bellissimo seemed to argue against that interpretation. “Anybody can sell steak,” he told me. “But if you can sell odds and ends of one thing or another, then you’re doing something.” The celebrated visitors who troop through the Anchor Bar are, after all, almost always favorably impressed by Buffalo chicken wings. Craig Claiborne proclaimed them “excellent” in one of his columns—although he may have undercut the compliment a bit by saying in the same paragraph that he had remained in Buffalo for only three hours.

  One way that the invention of the chicken wing seems to have improved morale is that there now exists among Buffalonians a widespread commercial fantasy of hitting it rich by introducing Buffalo chicken wings to some virgin territory. People in Buffalo are always talking about trying wings out on Southern California or testing the waters in Providence. While I was on my tour with the Katz family, Andy Katz, who is fifteen, had one question about my opinion of the local delicacy: “Do you think these would go over in Toronto?” There are already some attempts to sell wings outside of western New York. A former Buffalonian is serving wings in the Paco’s Tacos outlets of Boston. It is said that wings are available in Fort Lauderdale—where so many Buffalonians have retired that the annual events include a beef-on-weck banquet. This summer, in the new Harborplace shopping complex in the inner harbor of Baltimore, a place called Wings ’n Things opened with the announced intention of dealing in the sort of volume hitherto common only within Buffalo itself—a couple of tons of wings a week. “It takes money to make money,” Dom Bellissimo told me while reflecting on the fact that his family did not parlay the invention of chicken wings into a franchise fortune. Sometimes he thinks that the opportunity has not been lost forever. “I would like to go with a chain,” he told me. “I’m so ready for it. I wish I could get involved with some money people. I’d show them how to go with this thing.”