Chicken and Waffles: The Pennsylvania Story

Chicken and waffles made on a Griswold waffle iron and served with a fried chicken leg on an original 1930s dinner plate.
Roughwood Collection

In his 1861 local-color novel The Young Parson, German Reformed minister Peter Seibert Davis (1828–92) described chicken and waffles as the “stereotypical” Sunday supper among the Pennsylvania Dutch. How this dish moved from a regional identity food into mainstream American cookery is indeed a complicated story, especially since chicken and waffles reached its height of popularity during the 1920s and 1930s in tandem with Prohibition and the rise of automobile tourism. In my book As American As Shoofly Pie, I included a chapter devoted to “Waffle Palaces,” since this is as much a tale about Pennsylvania Dutch cultural identity as it is a study in food tourism that eventually assumed a national identity of its own.

The waffle as we know it in the United States evolved as a festive food in northwest Germany and Holland, eaten mostly at Christmas or New Year. Indeed, waffles are sometimes called New Year “cakes” (Neujahrskuchen) in German, since they are so much an integral part of that celebration. They were the by-product of a gradual secularization of medieval food customs originally based on religious practices. As Hans Wiswe pointed out in his 1970 cultural history of cookery, the word waffle derives from the German waben (to weave) in reference to the woven or web-like pattern covering the surface of each waffle. Waffle is also cognate with the English word wafer, and not surprising, the earliest medieval waffles were wafers, or at least crisp and wafer-thin.

In medieval Europe, cast iron or carved marble stamps were used to press waffle patterns on communion wafers. The wafers made with the stamps were cut into small squares, and each piece was given to communicants during mass. Communion wafers for the nobility were often sweetened or spiced or even colored with saffron, and it was out of those epicurean wafers that the modern cakelike baking powder waffle evolved. Considering that wafers and thick yeast-raised waffles required the best grade of flour and fresh eggs that were not readily available during the winter (old-time chickens laid eggs mostly during warm months), the waffle was not an everyman’s food. Because of this cost factor, waffles remained a festive specialty well into the early 1900s. All of that changed after the introduction of the “American” waffle iron in 1908. Aside from this innovation, two other market forces played into the popularity of the chicken-and-waffle menu: the rise of the poultry industry (cheap chicken and eggs) and the increased use of baking powder to leaven waffles, thus replacing the traditional yeast that was time-consuming to make and reducing the number of eggs required to leaven the batter.

A 1908 menu card from Caledonia Hotel, Chambersburg, featuring chicken in gravy served over waffles with a side of fried chicken.
Roughwood Collection

But before delving into the “American” waffle iron and its history, it would be instructive to define what is meant by a chicken-and-waffle dinner. Surviving menus, like one from 1908 for the Hotel Caledonia in Chambersburg and another from 1916 for the George Washington Inn at Valley Forge, make it abundantly clear that there were two main types of meal combinations with many intermediate price variations. One combination consisted of chicken in gravy served over fresh waffles (no sugar in the waffle batter). That type of meal with a side of fried chicken was featured on the 1908 menu card from the Hotel Caledonia.

The other meal format consisted of fried or roast chicken with a side of sweet waffles as featured on the 1916 George Washington Inn menu. This latter combination became popular in the South during the 1920s and 1930s, doubtless because African Americans were exposed to it during the Great Migration north. Black aristocracies in Baltimore and Philadelphia also had been organizing their own chicken-and-waffle dinners since the 1800s, as well attested in newspaper notices. This meal concept was perfectly tailored for a Down Home–style church fundraiser or funeral banquet. In both classic menu combinations, the waffle supplanted the role of ordinary bread — there is no bread on either the Valley Forge or Chambersburg menus — especially toast since many types of meat gravy were consumed over toast in the 19th century.

Broiled chicken with a side of waffles on a 1916 chromolithograph postcard menu from George Washington Inn, Valley Forge.
Roughwood Collection

The idea of a bread substitute is most likely the direct inspiration for chicken and waffles in the Dutch Country, except that the original toast substitute in this case was a less expensive local food called Datsch, a type of flat bread baked down hearth and discussed in detail in my book Dutch Treats. It is very easy to bake Datsch in a waffle iron and it is far more delectable when baked that way — otherwise it resembles spoon bread or dumplings in texture. Thus, two parallel concepts melded into one: the Datsch-and-gravy of Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse cookery and the catfish-and-waffle cookery of the rustic Philadelphia hotels that once populated the banks of the Schuylkill River. The Schuylkill Hotel (1813) and especially the famous 1840s Catfish and Waffle House at the Falls of the Schuylkill were well-known locally for their catfish-and-waffle dinners: catfish gravy over waffles or fried catfish with a side of waffles. Those are the basic menu formats carried over into chicken-and-waffle dinners.

The clientele who patronized those catfish hotels were mostly working class, since the food was cheaper than restaurant dining and there were fixed prices for all categories of dinner combinations on the menus. This meant that patrons knew ahead of time what they could afford, and it was common practice for groups of people to pool their money and graze from the menu Chinese restaurant style. That flexibility is what appealed most to this kind of consumer, not to mention that the eateries specializing in catfish-and-waffle dinners were seasonal, open on weekends from May through October since that is when catfish were best for consumption. The shift to chicken and waffles occurred during the late 1840s primarily in rural hotels along railroad and trolley lines. The advantage of the shift to chicken was that poultry remained in season all year around, no need to build a hotel along a riverbank, and thus this innovation became as Pastor Davis wrote in 1861 “stereotypical” Sunday fare throughout the Dutch Country. The catfish-andwaffle menu did not disappear altogether, because rural hotels along rivers like the Wild Cat Falls Inn at Marietta and the old Accomac Hotel at Wrightsville could supply their tables with fish from the Susquehanna.

Catfish-and-waffle dinners were served at the original Kugler’s Restaurant in Philadelphia. This tinted postcard view of the interior is dated 1908.
Roughwood Collection

From an ethnographic standpoint, the distance between waffles and fish was not that great in Pennsylvania Dutch folk culture. New Year waffles often accompanied the New Year fish (real or symbolic), a culinary custom preserved in the numerous fish-shaped ceramic molds that have survived from the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the New Year waffle was introduced into Pennsylvania during the 1680s by the German Quakers from Crefeld who settled the Germantown section of what is now Philadelphia, the coming together of fish and waffles may have evolved as a highly localized hybrid given that Quaker culture was dominant at that time. For certain, the German Quakers gave Philadelphia its scrapple, so there is much more to be said about their influence on regional cuisine and the evolution of Schuylkill River fish fries.

Shankweiler’s Hotel menus, such as this one from 1944, featured chicken and waffles as well as steak and waffles in both restaurant locations.
Roughwood Collection

This deeply rooted local identity may explain why catfish and waffles remained on menus in Philadelphia well into the early 1900s, especially in restaurants catering to local businessmen like Old Kuglers or Boothby’s Oyster House on Chestnut Street. In Philadelphia café society, catfish and waffles never offered the same highbrow panache of other regional foods like terrapin or reed birds; the appeal was largely nostalgic loyalty to food with an Old Philadelphia context. Yet it made a good businessman’s luncheon. This is born out to some extent in the 1901 cookbook 300 Ways to Cook and Serve Shellfish published by Boothby’s talented African American chef Harry Franklyn Hall. Although he never introduced waffles as an option in his cookbook, any of his “a la cream” recipes would serve well as gravy, a choice mentioned on several of Boothby’s surviving menus. This dichotomy between culinary history preserved in cookbooks and the table reality of menus should remind us that the big picture is often preserved in the most ephemeral kind of evidence.

While the popularity of catfish and waffles began to fade in the early 20th century along with rustic regional foods in general, the popularity of chicken and waffles moved to center stage. This shift was the result of the Griswold Manufacturing Co. of Erie, which patented its “American” waffle iron in December 1908 and shortly thereafter embarked on an advertising campaign that drew national attention to the novel design. One of the earliest notices appeared in the March 1909 edition of the Ladies Home Journal, the critical message being that now you too can have waffle suppers at home. The presumption was that until then waffle dinners were special occasion meals not generally eaten in the home, at least outside the Dutch Country. In fact, hotel menus from this period confirm that chicken-and-waffle meals were commonly served as Sunday dinner attractions designed to appeal to city folk in touring cars, or “autoists” as they were called in the early days of automobile tourism. That was the original draw of such legendary chicken-and-waffle restaurants as the two Lehigh County Shankweiler hotels, one at Fogelsville, the other near New Tripoli. The customers in those hotels came primarily from Allentown or nearby cities. The first hotel at New Tripoli opened in 1905 and immediately established its reputation for chicken and waffles. It garnered additional fame in 1934 by opening one of the first drive-in movie theaters in the country.

Kuechlers Roost on Mount Penn in Reading, pictured on this circa 1912 tinted postcard, was noted for its wine and its chicken-and-waffle dinners.
Roughwood Collection

Perhaps the earliest and most famous Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant specializing in chicken-and-waffle dinners was Kuechler’s Roost on Mount Penn in Reading. It was begun in 1882 by Jacob Kuechler as a clubby locale for Reading’s Pennsylvania Dutch elite where dialect was spoken and ample wine from Kuechler’s vineyard was consumed. In 1905 his gentleman’s retreat was transformed into a restaurant by Karl August Schaich and that is when the public became acquainted with the classic Pennsylvania Dutch cookery served there. Unfortunately, the restaurant and winery burned in 1919 and, because of Prohibition, was never rebuilt. Despite that, many of the restaurant’s chicken-and-waffle menus have been preserved and colorfully described in Mike Madaio’s Lost Mount Penn, a book about Reading’s historic wineries.

A 1954 menu written entirely in PennsylvanianDutch for Miller’s in Ronks.
Roughwood Collection

Another Pennsylvania regional restaurant that became a temple of chicken-and-waffle cookery was Millers in Ronks, now known as Miller’s Smorgasbord. The restaurant opened in 1929 as a truck stop for produce vendors. Owners Enos and Anna Miller soon realized that there was money to be made by providing the drivers with a meal and thus the fame of their chicken-and-waffle dinners was born. The truck stop soon evolved into a full-scale family-style restaurant. Subsequent owner Thomas Strauss continued the chicken-and-waffle dinners and even published menus in Pennsylvania Dutch, calling attention to the fact that the restaurant was in the heart of Lancaster County’s Amish Belt.

My own paternal grandmother, Grace Hickman Weaver, contributed her bit to the chicken-and-waffle story. During the 1920s she and her younger sister organized pickle buffets and waffle dinners to accompany bridge and mahjong parties for society ladies in an old stone house in Downingtown in Pennsylvania’s Chester County. The goal was to raise money for the care of nieces and nephews left indigent by the death of their mother (my grandmother’s older sister). After that project was finished, the owner of the house eventually opened it as a tearoom called the Tea House, where my grandmother’s recipe for heart-shaped waffles served with chicken a la king was recommended by Duncan Hines in the 1941 edition of his Adventures in Good Eating. This guide is also useful for identifying the many other restaurants and tearooms throughout the country that were serving chicken and waffles by that time — or multitudes of variations, like chipped beef and waffles, duck and waffles, or steak and waffles. All these choices were available on the menu of the Old Cartwheel Inn at New Hope in Bucks County, thus exposing the New York summer crowd to regional cookery at its best.

The fragile nature of the chicken-and-waffle story and its documentation is probably nowhere better demonstrated than in the 1930s match cover for Miller’s Hotel in Strausstown. Since there were no printed menus (the chalkboard menu changed daily), posterity would never have known that this rustic tavern was a hub of chicken-and-waffle cookery in Pennsylvania’s Berks County had it not been for the chance survival of the advertisement on a match cover. It is this sort of ephemeral material that makes chicken-and-waffle research so challenging, and yet so full of unexpected revelations.

In some cases, the only available documentation for a restaurant’s fare is on advertising ephemera, such as this 1930s matchcover promoting chicken and waffles at Miller’s Hotel in Strausstown.
Roughwood Collection

The popularity of chicken and waffles was not exclusive to rural southeastern Pennsylvania; the dish migrated via primary highways into many western parts of the state and well beyond. The Hotel Kauffman in Zelienople (on the main road connecting Pittsburgh and Erie) was once well-known for its chicken-and-waffle dinners and not just creamed chicken on waffles but chicken a la king over waffles and even creamed turkey on waffles. After William J. Thomas bought the hotel in 1944, he created a “chicken ranch” nearby and it served as the source for chicken dishes on the menu. This apparent early-20th-century explosion in the popularity of chicken-and-waffle dinners came about because the Griswold Manufacturing Co. took their original advertising campaign to another level and this contributed to the nationalization of the chicken-and-waffle menu. In the process of popularizing chicken-and-waffle dinners outside the confines of the Keystone State, the menu shed its Pennsylvania Dutch identity and became something more generally American. That was the Griswold pitch from the start: this was American cookery as opposed to ethnic fare found in urban centers. That is why the waffle iron was dubbed “American.”

Detail of a Griswold advertisement from the December 1909 issue of Good Housekeeping.
Roughwood Collection

One of the Griswold ads appeared in the December 1909 issue of Good Housekeeping with a testimonial from a gentleman (unnamed) from Avalon, Pennsylvania, who was shown eating his Griswold waffles with syrup. More important, the key to the success of the waffle iron advertising campaign was also mentioned in this promotion: anyone purchasing the “American” waffle iron would receive a free 14-page pamphlet cookbook called American Waffles: The Proper Method of Laying & Serving the Table. The author of this cookbook was Janet McKenzie Hill (1852–1933) of Boston Cooking School fame. Her nationally prominent name lent credibility to Griswold’s waffle iron, not to mention that this now-rare pamphlet is also one of the few cookbooks devoted exclusively to recipes for chicken and waffles. With the help of Janet Hill, Griswold was able to mainstream its waffle irons, thus chicken-and-waffle dinners became iconic Sunday fare in many parts of the country — even in New England and the Upper Midwest, be it a fundraiser for church or a community organization, or just part of the draw of automobile tourism and dining out in rural inns.

This hardware catalog illustration shows two styles of patented Griswold waffle irons, circa 1920: the regular for cast iron stoves and the deep ring for gas and oil stoves.
Roughwood Collection

The unique feature that made the irons so easy to use was the ball socket on the side opposite the handles. This meant that the waffle iron could be flipped over at will and thus ensure even baking. The high-quality forged iron with its excellent heat transfer also contributed to the superior performance of this utensil, the reason why Griswold cooking wares are still sought after today on the collectibles market. There were two basic Griswold waffle iron designs: the regular for cast iron stoves and the deep ring for gas and oil stoves. Both models also feature wire handles that reduce heat transfer from the iron, thus eliminating the need for a potholder to turn the iron over.

The chicken-and-waffle meal appealed to a generation of Americans who sought out sit-down family style dining perhaps as an antidote to food shortages during the Great Depression. Yet, it is also true that this kind of meal became iconic of Prohibition cuisine, since it was standard fare in tearooms and at Sunday after-church dinners in popular restaurants like Walps in Allentown or the Harriet Lane Coffee Shop in Mercersburg, where according to a menu in my collection the Sunday, September 30, 1934, special chicken-and-waffle dinner cost 50 cents. Critics of this type of meal have called it bland and androgynous, but that depends on how the ingredients are handled. One thing for certain, where restaurants took the time to prepare these dinners from scratch, local nuances and rich flavors came into play.

There are food writers who contend that chicken and waffles was created somewhere other than Pennsylvania. For example, some have conjectured that the dish originated in the South. The reality is that Southern cooks have embraced something created outside the region and have since integrated it into their cuisine. There are several different strains or variations of this dish, with their own lines of evolution, but they are often conflated into one oversimplified narrative.

Ample references to chicken-and-waffle dinners in Pennsylvania sources tracing back to the 1850s and before would contradict those presumptions. Pennsylvania is the state where foundries began casting waffle irons even in the 18th century, although not everyone could afford them. Perhaps most important, the less obvious narrative is all the same apparent from the George Washington Inn menu design itself and its patriotic motifs: this is American food, nothing foreign about it. Chicken and waffles started as conservative working-class fare, rural farmhouse cookery, a frugal recycling of leftover meat, food symbolic of a pre-Civil War golden age. By the early 20th century it had transformed itself through industrialization into a social metaphor for Norman Rockwell’s iconic middle-class America.

Making Waffles with a Griswold Waffle Iron

For readers who want to make waffles in a number 9 Griswold waffle iron, the following instructions will save you from unnecessary mishaps.

An original Griswold “American” waffle iron with waffles baked in it.
Roughwood Collection

Rather than baking the waffles on the stovetop and dealing with batter spills (they can get messy), bake the entire iron with its base in a preheated oven as instructed below. 1½ cups of batter will fill a number 9 waffle iron and yield 3 large waffles that can then be broken into quarters, giving a total of 12 pieces. Be sure to wear an oven mitt when handling the hot iron.

Ingredients
4 large eggs, separated
1½ cups buttermilk
¼ cup olive oil or vegetable oil
1¾ cups pastry flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt

Instructions
Beat the egg yolks until light and lemon color, then add the buttermilk and oil. In a separate work bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt twice so that all ingredients are evenly distributed. Add the egg mixture and stir to form thick batter. Beat the egg whites until stiff and forming peaks, then fold them into the batter. Allow the batter to rest for 5 minutes.

While the batter is resting, place the waffle iron and base on a baking sheet and set this in an oven preheated to 425 F. Once the iron is hot, remove it, oil both sides well, then add the batter, spreading it out to fill the waffle iron completely. Close the iron and set it back on the ring and bake without turning it over in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. Repeat this until all the batter is used.

Yield
Serves 6 (allowing 2 quarters per serving).

Further Reading

Davis, Peter Seibert. The Young Parson. 1861; reprint, Philadelphia: Smith, English & Co., 1863. / Hall, Harry Franklyn. 300 Ways to Cook and Serve Shellfish. Philadelphia: Christian Banner Print, [1901]. / Hill, Janet McKenzie. American Waffles: The Proper Method of Laying & Serving the Table. [Erie, PA: The Griswold Manufacturing Co., 1909]. / Hines, Duncan. Adventures in Good Eating. Bowling Green, KY: Adventures in Good Eating Inc., 1941. / Madaio, Mike. Lost Mount Penn: Wineries, Railroads and Restaurants of Reading. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2019. / Weaver, William Woys, “White Gravies in American Popular Diet.” In Food in Change. Edited by Alexander Fenton and Eszter Kisban. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986: 41-52. / —. As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. / —. Dutch Treats: Heirloom Recipes from Farmhouse Kitchens. Pittsburgh: St. Lynn’s Press, 2016. / Wiswe, Hans. Kulturgeschichte der Kochkunst [The Cultural History of Cookery]. Munich: Heinz Moos, 1970.

William Woys Weaver is an internationally known food historian, master gardener, and author of numerous books on food history, including As American as Shoofly Pie and Dutch Treats. He maintains the Roughwood Seed Collection of more than 7,000 heirloom food plants at the historic Lamb Tavern in Devon. His previous contribution to Pennsylvania Heritage was “Baking Pennsylvania Dutch Style” (Fall 2016).