The Reason Buffalo Wings Are Always Served With Celery

People underestimate celery. It might seem like a boring vegetable, but it has so many uses and can be a surprisingly delicious addition to meals. With it's fresh, bright taste and satisfying crunch, celery can take recipes up a notch. But while it's often used in soups and salads, it's become most famous for its pairing with Buffalo chicken wings. It would almost feel like theft if you ordered Buffalo wings and received them without signature celery sticks and a tiny cup of blue cheese dressing. So how did this combination come to be so ubiquitous? 

The most popular story brings us to Buffalo, New York. The year is 1964, and Frank and Teressa Bellissimo are faced with a dilemma. Their son Dominic and his friends are hanging out at the family's food and drink establishment, Anchor Bar, throwing back some drinks. They start to get hungry and ask for something to satisfy their munchies. So Teressa did what all good moms (and cooks) do — she improvised. She made some wings with hot sauce and served them with stuff she had left over from preparing an antipasto platter, namely celery sticks.

The combination stuck. It's hard to believe that Buffalo chicken wings were an upstate New York regional secret until the 1980s because now you can't enter a strip mall without falling over a Buffalo Wild Wings chain. 

The pairing of spicy Buffalo wings with celery might seem like a happy accident, but let's give Teressa Bellissimo credit. Owning a pub, she probably understood how certain foods just go well together. Call it experience or intuition or a little bit of both. If you think about it, it's not so hard to understand why celery accompanies spicy chicken wings so flawlessly. 

For those who need a break from the burn of the sauce, celery is around 95% water and provides an initial cooling contrast to the spicy chicken. But if you work with food, you know that the solution to an unhappy, burning mouth is to drink milk, not water. This is because milk contains a protein called casein, which can soothe your mouth after eating too much capsaicin — the chemical compound found in hot peppers. Thus, dipping a spicy wing into blue cheese can tame the heat if you're overwhelmed.

But not everyone needs to be rescued from the spice of a Buffalo chicken wing. All of these flavors complement each other taste-wise. Celery is crisp and fresh, which is an excellent contrast to the sauce-slicked, fatty pieces of chicken you're shoving in your face alongside salty, funky blue cheese. Crunching into a stalk also provides the chance to experience a different texture in your mouth alongside all the chewy chicken and cheesy globs.