48. Not the Other Buffalo Wings
Before there was Frank's, there was Mumbo
Just a reminder that the mystery of Hi-Ho remains unsolved. If you want to help discover Hi-Ho’s identity, please share the last issue with someone you think is more likely to know who Hi-Ho is, no matter how faint a chance it might seem. In his small-world experiment, Stanley Milgram discovered that any two random Americans are separated from an average of just three friendship links. That’s how close we might be to figuring it out!
And now on to our next story…
Read enough about food and you will run into a lot of the same origin stories again and again. Their veracity can range from out and out fabrications—the Margherita pizza was created to commemorate Queen Margherita’s visit to Naples in 1889—to omitting part of the story—Walter Chell did mix the first Bloody Caesar at the Calgary Inn in 1969, but there are many similar drinks that were documented as early as 1951—to the fairly accurate—Caesar Cardini actually did invent the Caesar salad at his restaurant in Tijuana in 1937.1
Another story that falls into the middle category, the true but incomplete stories, is one that was, as far as I knew until recently, definitive: Teressa Bellissimo made the first Buffalo chicken wings coated in a blend of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce and butter at the Anchor Bar in March 1964. That’s the story I had heard since I was a kid, when Buffalo wings first started turning up in Toronto in the early ’80s. My father, ever the culinary adventurer, had gotten wise to them, I believe, at Phil’s, a bar near Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant that was an ad guy hangout at the time and one of the first places2 in the city to serve them. Shortly after that, dedicated wing places like the Chicken Thief on Cumberland started popping up and the race was on. From that time forward, it was always the Bellissimo’s story that was told.
There’s nothing to suggest any of their story is a fabrication. But to say that it was the moment chicken wings became a thing in Buffalo is to leave out a huge part of the story. And, like so many stories, the part that gets left out involves a Black person.
In the early ’60s, John Young started selling chicken wings at Wings and Things, his restaurant less than a mile east of the Anchor Bar. His wings borrowed their “Mumbo” sauce from wing joints in Chicago and DC, a tangy, tomato-based sauce with a bit of heat and a smack of sweetness. Wings and Things was an instant hit, with lines down the block on the day it opened.
There’s also no evidence that Teressa Bellissimo ripped off John Young’s recipe. Hers is hot and sour and buttery while Young’s is hot and sweet and tangy. But it’s hard not to imagine that Young’s instant success might have caused a lot of people in Buffalo to look at chicken wings, which at that point were mostly used for making chicken stock, a little differently.
Even in 1983, Calvin Trillin,3 in his “An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing” acknowledged that Young had at least a partial claim to having invented them, even though his were sold whole (i.e., not split into drumettes and flats) and breaded. But since that time, the Bellissimo story has endured, possibly in part because the Anchor Bar has, while Young has largely been written out of the picture.4
Happily, in the last few years John Young’s style of wings has started enjoying a revival. Spurred on by a local bicycle tour guide with an interest in the history of Buffalo wings, Young’s daughter started staging a series of pop-up events to sell her father’s wings, which she had cooked at his restaurants as a teen. Following that success, she and the tour guide joined forces to launch a retail version of her father’s Mumbo sauce.
This short documentary is a great retelling of their story:
By the time I had found out about this, the first batch of sauce had sold out. Rather than wait for the second batch to become available (and unsure if they would even ship to Canada) I decided to make some on my own. Because Mumbo sauce is an established thing in DC and Chicago, I was able to find a recipe that may not have been an exact copy of Young’s, but was at least in the same ballpark.
The Mumbo sauce is made of ketchup, white vinegar, dark brown sugar, pineapple juice, hot sauce, soy sauce, salt, paprika, white pepper, and garlic powder, whisked until combined and then simmered until thick enough to coat a spoon.
Since I would be cooking my wings in the oven instead of frying them, I approximated a light breading with a toss in some rice flour mixed with a bit of cornstarch and just a pinch of baking powder and baked them on a rack over a rimmed sheet pan at 400°(convection) for 17 minutes per side.
John Young’s method was to dunk the finished wings in a simmering pot of Mumbo sauce, but that seemed more feasible for a restaurant what would dunk multiple batches than for me, who was cooking just one. So instead I heated some of the Mumbo sauce in a wok and tossed the wings until they were completely coated.
Once they were nice and saucy, I served them with a creamy cole slaw to offset the tartness and sweetness of the Mumbo sauce. The wings were very different from what has become known as a Buffalo wing. The Mumbo sauce was more like an un-smokey barbecue sauce, similar to the sauce on the barbecue chicken served at the Jamaican places a few blocks away from our house.
Old habits die hard, of course. I have been eating “traditional” Buffalo wings for more than 40 years, but I can definitely see myself making space in the future for Mumbo wings5 and the chance to acknowledge John Young, the man who first got Buffalo eating sauced wings.
What I’m consuming…
Somebody Feed Phil Season 7 OK, not until March 1, but I will definitey be consuming it then.
Of the new destinations announced, I am most looking forward to Kyoto and Scotland, both of which are places dear to my heart. That said, Phil always finds great places and people wherever he goes, so I have no doubt all the rest will be interesting as well.
What’s on the menu…
We’ve been making a very conscious effort lately to eat food that has been languishing in the freezer for a while. I always find it helpful to do a complete inventory of what we actually have so I can incorporate it into the weekly meal plan. One of the things I was surprised to find was a pack of Cumberland bangers from the British Grocer in Burlington. I must have picked them up a while ago on my way home from visiting my father and stepmother. To be honest, I find their sausages a bit too faithfully British; compared to Canadian sausages, they have a lot more cereal filling than I am used to. But they’re in the freezer so they’re getting used!
I hadn’t made Toad in the Hole (sausages roasted in Yorkshire pudding batter, a classic stuff-in-thing) in a few years, so it got a spot in this week’s dinner plan. (I’m including a photo of one I made a few years ago because the one I made this week was a very feisty riser to the point that parts of it got very dark and, although tasty, made it quite unphotogenic.)
Last made in 2021. OK, fine. I’ll show it to you.
It rose high enough that it smashed into the rack above.
Other than the slightly carbonized top edges, the Yorkshire was light and puffy. I wholeheartedly endorse the recipe I used, as well as the companion recipe for onion gravy.
“Read enough about food and drink with ‘Caesar’ in their names…” might have been a better opening.
He has since reminded me (after I already published this piece) that Cap’s, a bar on Jarvis just south of Bloor, was likely the first place in Toronto to serve Buffalo wings, with Phil’s following shortly after.
The venerable, the perfect
I would never had known any of this if not for “Deviled Bones - The History of Hot Wings” on the Tasting History with Max Miller YouTube channel and then further reading on the History Channel website.
And not just because I still have half-a-squeeze bottle of Mumbo sauce in the fridge.