on the sidebuffalo chicken pizza

A pizza sauced with cayenne-and-butter wing sauce instead of tomato, topped with chicken and mozzarella, and finished with blue cheese or ranch. Buffalo is applied here to a dish that is seasoned with the sauce rather than fried in the style at all.

The pizza chains and the wing arrived at each other from both directions. In 1994, following four Super Bowl appearances by the Buffalo Bills, Domino's added Buffalo wings to its national menu, and Pizza Hut followed the next year. The wing went onto the pizza menu first; the sauce went onto the pizza after.

Inference — the order runs the other way in Buffalo itself, where pizzerias were already selling wings out of the same kitchen. A shop with a fryer for wings and an oven for pizza has both halves of this dish on the line before anyone names it.

Brush the base with wing sauce in place of tomato. Cooked chicken — often the same breast meat a boneless order uses — mozzarella, sometimes red onion. Bake. Finish with a drizzle of blue cheese or ranch after the oven, not before, so the dressing does not split. Celery on the side is optional and in Buffalo it is not.

Carried by national chains and by independent pizzerias in Western New York, where the wing and the pie have shared a counter for decades. Inference — the dish is the clearest case of Buffalo as a flavour word: nothing about it is fried, and the name still reads.