The discovery lay in my mother's 45-year-old cookbook.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Brian Lagerstrom | 2023-08-17 16:00:49 |  903,881 Views |
3 Ways to Make the Best Chicken Wings of Your Life
My family ate spaghetti with jarred sauce and scallion salad almost every night when I was growing up with two exceptions. The dreaded “just a salad” nights and the rare magical “marinated chicken” dinners including one particularly memorable dinner that ended with my little brother dipping his napkin in the sauce and trying to eat it because he was all gone from the wings and rice and my mother had told him not to drink the sauce off his plate.
My brother wasn’t wrong in his desire to eat every last drop of that sauce. Our mother’s legendary chicken wings would spend a tantalizing hour in the oven emerging as crispy caramelized islands poking out of a sea of deep dark sauce. We’d pour the sweet sauce over bowl after bowl of white rice carefully pulling the tender meat from the bones and feasting until there was a graveyard on our plates. We called it jerk chicken but I was well into adulthood before I understood that while the term could describe a wide range of dishes our family favorite wasn’t going to be among them. Sure it might not have been literally jerk but it contained the key to chef-worthy chicken wings: ketchup.
In my mother's copy of Craig Claiborne's 1975 edition of The New York Times Cookbook her dutiful checkmarks list a handful of recipes in the chicken chapter few of which I remember her making; the rest of the book seems untouched. It always falls open to the same page crinkled and stuck to the binding by the last thread with the only recipe containing both a checkmark and a nearly perfectly round light brown drop of a stain. We called it "Jerk Chicken" but Craig Claiborne called it "Oven-Baked Chicken Wings with Honey."
