a person · NYTeressa Bellissimo

Cooked at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, which she opened with her husband Frank in 1935 and lived above. The bar credits her with frying the first plate of Buffalo wings on 4 March 1964 and sending it out with celery and blue cheese. She died in her apartment over the bar in November 1985, aged 84.

Teressa and Frank Bellissimo opened the Anchor Bar on Main Street in 1935. She ran the kitchen; he ran the front.

The house account puts her at the stove late on 4 March 1964. Her son Dominic was tending bar, friends of his arrived, and little food was left. Teressa took the wings that were headed for soup or the bin, deep-fried them, and flavoured them with butter, cayenne and other ingredients. She brought out cut celery and blue cheese to dip in. The first plates went out free.

The Bellissimos told the rest of it more than one way. Dominic gave Calvin Trillin a midnight version in 1980, keyed to the bar's mostly Catholic drinkers being able to eat meat again at twelve. Frank told a version in which a delivery went wrong and wings arrived instead of the backs and necks that went into the spaghetti sauce, and he asked Teressa to do something with them. In every version she is the one who cooks.

Inference — the tellings that survive come through Dominic and through Frank. No statement by Teressa herself reached this project's sources; what she thought of the story is not on the record here.

She was 84 when she died in November 1985. Frank had died in October 1980, also 84; Dominic in March 1991, at 68. In 2006 the National Buffalo Wing Festival put Frank and Teressa in the first class of its Hall of Flame.

Her name rides on the bar, the bottled sauce and the trademarked phrase. The celery and the cup of blue cheese she grabbed off the antipasto tray are still on the plate in bars that never heard of her.