a sauceBuffalo sauce

Cayenne pepper hot sauce cut with melted butter. Two things, warmed together and held warm, poured over fried wings in a metal bowl and shaken. More butter reads mild, less reads hot, and a kitchen moves between the three by changing that ratio rather than the pepper. Worcestershire sauce and garlic powder turn up in plenty of versions. Bottled ready-to-use wing sauce does the same job with oil and butter flavouring in place of butter, because butter separates on a shelf.

Cayenne pepper sauce arrived in Buffalo in a bottle. Frank's RedHot came out of Cincinnati and a Louisiana pepper farm in 1920; Crystal came out of New Orleans in 1923. Neither was made for wings.

The sauce got its name in 1964, or later, depending on whose account you take. At the Anchor Bar, Teressa Bellissimo fried wings and tossed them in cayenne sauce; the Bellissimo family told three different versions of that night, and Dominic Bellissimo gave Calvin Trillin one of them in 1980. John Young was selling breaded whole wings in a tomato-based mumbo sauce in Buffalo from 1961, and said the Anchor Bar did not carry wings as a regular menu item until 1974.

Inference — the butter is the part that travelled least well. A wing tossed at the counter gets butter; a wing that has to survive a shelf, a delivery bag or a factory gets oil and a butter flavouring. Frank's RedHot Buffalo Wings Sauce lists canola oil fifth and natural butter type flavour eighth, with no butter on the label.

Wikipedia's article on the wing notes that Frank's RedHot "was probably not the hot sauce that was used in the original 1964 Anchor Bar recipe." Nobody has produced the bottle.

Melt butter. Stir in cayenne pepper sauce off the heat and keep the mix warm, not hot, so it does not split. Fry the wings, drain them a moment, drop them in a bowl, pour the sauce over and shake — sauce after the fryer, never before, or the coating steams instead of sticking. Ratio sets the heat: roughly equal parts reads mild, more sauce than butter reads hot. Add Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder or a little vinegar if the house does.

Sold bottled by every large sauce maker and by most bars as house-made. The bottled kind states its heat on the front; the house kind states it at the counter. Nobody publishes a Scoville figure — the capsaicin measure named for the chemist Wilbur Scoville — for a finished Buffalo sauce, because the butter ratio changes it batch to batch. As of 16 September 2026, the USDA label panel for Frank's RedHot Buffalo Wings Sauce reads 460 mg sodium and no sugar in a tablespoon.