Chicken and waffles: the history of an American pairing from Pennsylvania to Harlem

The history of chicken and waffles, from Philadelphia catfish houses and Pennsylvania Dutch suppers to Wells in Harlem and Roscoe's in Los Angeles.

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^{FROM DUTCH WAFFLE IRONS TO HARLEM AND LOS ANGELES}

Fried chicken pieces on a waffle beside peaches topped with whipped cream — Chicken and waffles with peaches and cream, 2007. Image: arnold inuyaki, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chicken and waffles is an American pairing of chicken, either stewed in gravy or fried, served with a waffle. Its history runs through several separate traditions: the wafer irons of medieval Europe, the waffle irons carried to the American colonies, the catfish and waffle houses outside Philadelphia, the Sunday suppers of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and the late-night restaurants of Harlem. The best-known modern version, fried chicken on a waffle with butter and syrup, is usually traced to Wells in Harlem, which opened in 1938, and to Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles, founded in 1975. Writers disagree about which strand came first, and some of the most repeated stories, including one about Thomas Jefferson, rest on little documentary evidence.

^{WHERE DID WAFFLES COME FROM?}

Drawing of a long-handled wafer iron with two engraved circular plates — Wafer Iron, rendering by Bernard Westmacott, about 1937, National Gallery of Art. Image: National Gallery of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The waffle descends from flat cakes baked between two hot metal plates. Smithsonian magazine traces the line to cakes that ancient Greeks roasted between plates fixed to a long wooden handle. In medieval Europe these became oublies, thin cakes of grain flour and water often stamped with crosses, Biblical scenes and religious images. By the 13th century they were eaten by peasants and kings alike, and street vendors sold them outside churches on saints' days. Britannica notes that waffles appear in French poems as early as the 12th century, when they were sold at fairs and religious festivals. Spices later entered the recipe, and the oublie became the gaufre or wafel. Around the 15th century, Dutch waffle makers began using rectangular plates in place of round ones.

The irons themselves were valued objects. Historic wafering irons were given as wedding gifts and engraved with heraldic crests and animal symbols, and they appear in a sketch by Hieronymus Bosch. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America describes early hearth irons with flat hinged plates and long scissor-action handles, and records that irons brought to the American colonies produced a range of regional sweets: Dutch hard waffels, English wafers, Swedish krumkaga, Italian pizzelle and French gaufrettes. American waffles are typically leavened with baking powder, while yeast-raised waffles remain the norm in Belgium and France.

^{THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WAFFLE IRONS: RECORD AND STORY}

Thomas Jefferson is often credited with introducing waffles to the United States. According to Monticello research librarian Anna Berkes, interviewed by Garden & Gun, Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789 after serving as American minister to France. Shipping records show that he brought four waffle irons acquired in Amsterdam. Beyond those records, Monticello's archive holds only two direct references to waffles, both recipes in a collection kept by his granddaughter Septimia. One is attributed to a "Mrs. De Peyster", possibly a Dutch New Yorker, with a note that some people eat waffles with butter, sugar and powdered cinnamon. The second, with the same ingredients, is attributed to Monticello.

Asked whether Jefferson introduced waffles to the nation, Berkes answered: "The short answer is yes and no." No evidence survives that waffles were served on a Monticello or White House menu, and claims that they were rest on hearsay. The writer Adrian Miller, in a 2020 article for Resy, states that by the early 1800s notable Southerners such as Jefferson ate fried chicken and waffles for breakfast when entertaining guests. The Monticello records described by Berkes concern waffle irons and waffle recipes and do not mention chicken, so the Jefferson breakfast is best read as a story told by later writers.

^{CATFISH HOUSES AND THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH WAFFLE SUPPER}

Grey wash drawing of a chain suspension bridge over rocky river rapids — The Falls of the Schuylkill and Chain Bridge, watercolour, about 1811 to 1813, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The earliest known American references to waffles served as a meal with a main dish describe catfish, not chicken. An excerpt from As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine, published by University of Pennsylvania Press and reproduced by the food journal Table Matters, traces catfish and waffle dinners to hotels along the Schuylkill River and Wissahickon Creek outside Philadelphia in the early 1800s. The Schuylkill Hotel of 1813 was one such resort. The Catfish and Waffle House at the falls of the Schuylkill had a well-established reputation by 1848 that lasted into the early 1900s. Because catfish was a summer fish, these houses opened only from May or June to October. Chicken was added so that the meal could be served all year.

Inland, the pairing became a fixture of Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. By the 1860s, chicken and waffles was already an established custom in parts of the Dutch community. The German Reformed minister Peter Siebert Davis (1828 to 1892) was one of the first to remark on it, describing chicken and waffles in his novel The Young Parson as a standard Sunday supper. Resy's Miller attributes the tradition to German immigrants who brought a creamed chicken and waffle dish to rural Pennsylvania. By the late 1800s, writers treated chicken and waffles as emblematic of Pennsylvania Dutch cookery. Before large-scale poultry farming began in the 1950s, chicken was a special treat, and the dish drew city crowds to country hotels.

The Pennsylvania version differs from the one most diners know today. It consisted of a chicken-based gravy poured over the waffles, with some form of chicken served beside them. Philadelphia workers travelled by train to eat it at hotels in the Perkiomen Valley, and in the 1920s and 1930s menus across Pennsylvania offered it, particularly along the Lincoln Highway. Manufacturers took the meal into the home. The Griswold Manufacturing Company of Erie, Pennsylvania produced the 1908 American Waffle Iron, and a Griswold advertisement in the March 1909 Ladies' Home Journal told readers they could attend a chicken and waffle supper at home whenever they liked. The spread of electric waffle irons in the 1920s helped make it a national dish.

^{WELLS AND THE HARLEM CHICKEN AND WAFFLES STORY}

Black and white view of a wide avenue with a Gothic brick building — Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, Harlem, showing the Harlem Y.M.C.A., 1893. Image: Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The chicken in the modern dish is fried, and fried chicken has its own lineage. PBS Food traces it to the fricassee, chicken pieces braised in sauce, which appears in French culinary writing from the 1300s and in early cookbooks such as Le Viandier. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery gave a "Brown Fricasey" in which chicken was coated in egg and spiced breadcrumbs and fried in butter, a method that influenced many later recipes. In 1881, Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking included a fried chicken recipe using flour, fat and a thin gravy. Fried chicken met the waffle most famously in 1930s Harlem.

Wells opened in 1938 on what is now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, between 132nd and 133rd Streets, founded by Joseph Turner Wells, according to the New York Amsterdam News. Its sign read "Wells' Famous Home of Chicken & Waffles", and TIME calls it the Wells Supper Club. Musicians finishing gigs around the city were regular customers, and Wells stayed open into the early morning to serve them. The usual explanation for the dish, repeated by TIME in 2012, is that jazz musicians and entertainers who worked late had missed dinner and arrived too early for breakfast.

The Harlem story is widely told but disputed. Adrian Miller, writing for Resy, says it is not true that Wells invented the dish, pointing to fried chicken and waffles eaten in the United States since the 1700s and the older Pennsylvania tradition. The restaurant closed in 1982, when Wells became ill, and he died in 1987. A revival in the 1990s closed after a short run, and in 2005 the space became the Harlem Grill. The dish had already travelled with people who ate there. According to TIME, Gladys Knight has said that she took the idea for the Chicken & Waffles restaurant she opened in Atlanta in 1996 with the singer Ron Winans from Wells, where she and other musicians ate while touring New York.

^{HERB HUDSON AND ROSCOE'S IN LOS ANGELES}

Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Southern California, according to the company, was founded in 1975 by Herb Hudson, a Harlem native. Miller describes Hudson as a former General Motors foreman who moved to California to open the restaurant, and says Hudson first ate the dish at Wells. Hudson drew on his Motown connections, and the company credits friends from music and television such as Stevie Wonder and Natalie Cole with spreading the word. The company describes itself as a soul food chain best known for chicken and waffles, served together and separately.

Roscoe's expanded across the region. Early sites, according to Miller, included the former Tommy Tucker's Play Room, a former coffee shop on Pico Boulevard, South Central Los Angeles and Pasadena. The company now lists seven restaurants: Hollywood, South LA, Long Beach, Pasadena, Inglewood near LAX, Anaheim and La Brea. The Number 9, "Country Boy", is three fried chicken wings with a choice of fries, potato salad or a waffle. When President Barack Obama visited in 2011 and chose the waffle, Roscoe's renamed the item "Obama's Special". Stymie's Choice, another named plate, is fried chicken livers in gravy over grits with eggs.

^{HOW IS CHICKEN AND WAFFLES SERVED?}

Stack of waffles topped with butter in a pool of syrup on a plate — Waffles with maple syrup and butter, 2010. Image: Evan Swigart, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two broad versions of chicken and waffles exist. The older Pennsylvania Dutch style, as the Shoofly Pie account describes it, pours chicken-based gravy over a plain waffle and serves chicken beside it. Poorer households, according to the recollections of Miriam Smoker Brendle, who grew up in an Amish household near Atglen, often substituted pancakes eaten with chicken gravy. The savoury use of the waffle survives elsewhere too: Britannica notes that in North America waffles can serve as a base for poultry or seafood in sauce. The soul food style that spread from Harlem and Los Angeles instead pairs fried chicken, served on the bone at Roscoe's, with a breakfast-style waffle.

The fried version takes the dressings of an American breakfast. Britannica records that American waffles are commonly topped with butter and maple syrup, and the fried chicken plate keeps both. Miller describes the debates among Roscoe's diners: whether to eat the chicken and the waffle separately with syrup and hot sauce, or to fold the waffle around the bone-in chicken and dip it in maple syrup, or to cut everything up and mix it with syrup. Diners add bacon, eggs, sausage or grits.

^{CHICKEN AND WAFFLES AT YARDBIRD SINGAPORE}

Yardbird main dining area with a long communal table and mason jar pendant lights — Yardbird Southern Table & Bar, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

Yardbird Southern Table & Bar was founded by John Kunkel of 50 Eggs Hospitality Group, with the original restaurant opening in Miami in 2011. The Singapore restaurant at Marina Bay Sands opened in July 2017 and is the only Yardbird location outside the United States. Its signature fried chicken is brined for 27 hours and served with a Vermont cheddar waffle and watermelon. Fried chicken with a waffle is the form popularised at Wells and Roscoe's, and cheddar has its own route from Somerset caves to Vermont farms.

The Singapore interior is built around a "Barnhouse" concept, with reclaimed barn doors, white walls, and reclaimed wood and metal; barn doors come from a building type with its own American history, set out in the American barn. The bar centres on bourbon, whose rules are covered in what makes bourbon bourbon. The fried chicken behind the plate has its own history, from the fricassee to Abby Fisher's 1881 recipe, set out in full in the history of Southern fried chicken.