tragedy and chicken wings

I: tragedy

Sometimes when tragedy strikes, it’s no one’s fault, just blind bad luck. Other times when tragedy strikes, it is someone’s fault, but it was an understandable, forgivable mistake.

But sometimes the cause of a tragedy is unchecked human pride and arrogance.

Sometimes man flies too close to the sun.

II: ambition

Ambition is one of humanity’s most powerful traits. It is the evolutionary drive to thrive freed from the mundane challenge of survival. Ambition took humanity to the moon and to the top of Mt. Everest and powered humanity’s greatest achievements. But some of history’s greatest tragedies were the result of misguided ambition, the foremost of which being the invention of breaded chicken wings.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s divide the chicken wing world into two main categories: naked¹ wings and breaded wings. The difference, in case it’s not immediately clear, is that breaded wings are breaded, while naked wings are not.

III: right

To cook a naked wing, you just take a chicken wing and throw it in hot oil to fry. The outer layer of the naked wing is skin, with a layer of fat between the skin and the meat. Consider the naked wing immediately after being plunged into the fryer: on the outside of the skin is boiling fat, perfectly cooking and crisping the outside of the skin. On the inside of the skin is fat being rapidly heated, now liquid, now itself boiling, frying the chicken skin from both sides simultaneously.

Further inside, the dark meat is basted with boiling subcutaneous wing fat as the heat from the fryer cooks it. The result is as close to perfection as we can hope to come on Earth: hot, juicy, flavorful dark meat, itself crispy in all the right places, surrounded by perfectly fried chicken skin, surrounded by nature’s batter.

In reading this description of a naked wing cooking, were any gaping flaws apparent to you? Did glaring, obvious opportunities to improve the recipe or the process occur to you? The answer should be no, but there are some who are dissatisfied with the naked wing’s natural perfection, or fail to perceive it as such. These are the perhaps well-intentioned yet ultimately horribly misguided, strivers, “innovators,” who birthed into the world the breaded chicken wing.

IV: wrong

Cooking a breaded wing demands the injection of extra steps into the flawless cooking process described above, none of which are concerned with the chicken itself. This tragic lack of poultry focus is emblematic of the extraneity of the breading.

You prepare a wash of egg and milk.

You prepare a mixture of flour and seasoning.

You dip the wing in the wash, introducing foreign water to the process, water that will phase transition to steam, which is the enemy of crispiness.

You dip the now-sopping-wet wing in the flour mixture.

Now a suffocating slurry of soggy bread precursors surround the wing, separating it from the rendering heat of the fryer like a helicopter parent separating her child from the crucible of life.

Now when this wing is thrown in the hot oil to fry, it is not the skin that will crisp to perfection, but the slurry.

Now the extra insulation prevents the subcutaneous wing fat’s critical liquefaction.

Now instead of boiling away and cooking the wing to caramelized perfection from within, the fat remains, congealed in white gelatinous blobs beneath the still-soggy skin.

Now the breaded wing is cooked.

In contrast to the cohesive, integrated, high-amplitude² piece of food-as-art that is the cooked naked wing, the cooked breaded wing is an unpleasant amalgam of strange bedfellows: soft, squishy meat beneath congealed fat beneath soggy skin beneath crunchy, flavorless breading. Something of inestimable value has been lost, the cost of penance for the sin of pride, extracted unconsciously from the uncontrite cook.

V: hubris

The existence of the breaded wing constitutes a claim that humans can make a better breading than nature, a skin better than the skin worn by the chicken in life. That human ingenuity can improve on a perfection produced by millennia of genetic mutation and natural selection.

The story of the breaded wing is a Greek tragedy without a proper tragic hero ³, a morality play warning of the disastrous consequences of hubris.

The story of the breaded wing is the story of Icarus.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

(quotes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses)

Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete, and his long exile, and filled with a desire to stand on his native soil, was imprisoned by the waves. ‘He may thwart our escape by land or sea’ he said ‘but the sky is surely open to us: we will go that way: Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens’. So saying he applied his thought to new invention and altered the natural order of things.

Daedalus, in his ambition, seeks to alter the natural order of things; like those who cook breaded wings, he is about to attempt dangerous wing innovation.

He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and bees’-wax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings.

Like breaded wings, Daedalus’s wings merely imitate real bird’s wings.

When he had put the last touches to what he had begun, the artificer balanced his own body between the two wings and hovered in the moving air. He instructed the boy as well, saying ‘Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes.

Here, Daedalus warns Icarus about the danger moisture poses to wings, clearly admonishing Icarus against including a milk and egg wash in his wing preparation process. Taking a step back from this literal interpretation, he’s also warning Icarus, and those wishing to cook wings, against both complacency and hubris.

We know how the story turns out for both:

…the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings: and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but losing his oar-like wings, could not ride the air. Even as his mouth was crying his father’s name, it vanished into the dark blue sea, the Icarian Sea, called after him. The unhappy father, now no longer a father, shouted ‘Icarus, Icarus where are you? Which way should I be looking, to see you?’ ‘Icarus’ he called again. Then he caught sight of the feathers on the waves, and cursed his inventions.

The lesson of the myth is clear: when dealing with wings, one must manage heat and moisture carefully, or face certain destruction. Without the temperance of humility, man’s attempt at innovation, driven by pride, will bring only sorrow.