Comfort food: Local Flavor writer shares mom's wing sauce recipe
May 14—Local Flavor loves hearing about mothers and grandmothers.
Whenever readers who are kind enough to share a recipe say the dish originated from a beloved matriarch in their family, we know we're in for a good story.
So, what better way to celebrate the moms, grandmas and other maternal figures in our lives on Mother's Day than a feature with my own mom, Daria Rochinski?
I recently spent a Saturday with my mom in her Jessup home, learning how to make the famous Hot Wing Sauce she created while owning a Midvalley pizzeria in the mid-1990s. She doesn't follow a recipe, so we had a grand ol' time figuring out the measurements.
Admittedly, I didn't taste her wing sauce until adulthood. She made it often while I was growing up, but as a stubborn picky eater, I preferred plain chicken wings. Once I came around and tried her sauce, however, I understood what I had been missing.
Mom first served this sauce at the former Pizza Paige in Dickson City, which she named after my older sister before I came along. Customers bought containers of her mild and hot sauces to take home and loved seeing her occasionally working on roller skates for maximum efficiency.
She originally discovered her affinity for pizza-making as a teenager thanks to her first job at Luigi's Restaurant & Pizzeria in Olyphant. She worked folding takeout boxes and eventually learned how to make pizza there, and then expanded her knowledge at the former Giovanni's Pizzeria before it moved from Dickson City to Dunmore.
Mom grew up in the kitchen with her grandma who basically raised her, Emma Shevchik (also known as Nanny). Nanny died in 1994, and Mom remembers her to this day as loving and caring with a spine of steel.
"She was very influential in my life," Mom said.
A resident of Olyphant and Throop, Nanny lived through the Great Depression and knew how to stretch resources, living by the phrase "Waste not, want not." People looked forward to her high-quality dishes at St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran Church, especially her Pagash and Chocolate Cake.
"She would use the same bowl, the same pan, the same rolling pin, the same everything. She never changed her utensils, nothing like that. Everything was old and it always worked," my mom said. "Everything was made by hand, from scratch."
Nanny had a secretiveness when it came to recipes. The few she wrote down didn't tell the whole story, just in case they got into the wrong hands. My mom remembers questioning Nanny while watching her do steps that weren't listed in the recipe book.
"Don't you worry about it," Nanny used to tell her.
My mom used Nanny's dough recipe with a few tweaks at Pizza Paige. She also credits her childhood best friend, Shirley Kalinowski, for helping perfect the pizza and wing sauces. Mom didn't like the oil separation a lot of wing sauces had from sitting overnight, and she found that using Imperial Margarine nicely held her sauce together. Honey makes the sauce stick to the wings better, and hot honey can give them an extra kick. She prefers a thicker sauce, but cooks can use as much water as they like to reach their desired consistency.
In the early 2000s after Pizza Paige, Mom rented the kitchen space at the now-closed Mugshots bar in Dickson City and named it Whatchamacallit's. She served all the favorites from Pizza Paige at the bar, including quarts of her wing sauce. As a kid, I loved hanging out in the kitchen because she would give me a piece of pizza dough to play with before I baked my masterpiece in the oven.
Mom wouldn't run a restaurant again, especially after seeing the devastation of the industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, but she loved building relationships with customers and the community. Most recently, she did this for over a decade working at Joseph's Restaurant in Peckville.
It's no surprise to me when we see former regulars out and about who loved having my mom as their server.
After finishing the sauce, we went out to lunch and she silently paid the bill for someone she knew. That day, I went home with wings and sauce, of course, but also two containers of fresh-cut fruit and an item she noticed (and decided) I needed for my home. She's always thinking of us, and others.
She's the best.
Contact the writer:
bwilliams@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9100 x5107;
@BWilliamsTT on Twitter
