Chattanooga, a town of a 180,000 people, punches well above its weight in terms of goofy tourist attractions. There’s the Chattanooga Choo Choo, the Tennessee Aquarium (catfish!), the National Model Railroad Association Museum in Soddy Daisy, and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, Rock City. For my money, however, the one that stands atop the heap of unexpected goofiness is the International Towing and Recovery Museum. Located close by the foot of Lookout Mountain, it’s the perfect short stop for any car-mad boy of six or sixty.
Three weeks ago, on an early spring morning, I had a couple of hours to kill while my daughter went to a tryout for the Under-19 national rowing team. A couple of hours that started with a plate of biscuits and gravy next to the Incline Railway and ended at the International Towing and Recovery Museum.
It was, even before the biscuits and gravy, a beautiful day. Chattanooga in the spring is vastly underrated. The morning was cool and overcast, but the eastern redbuds were in full bloom, a splash of pink on gray and green. Everything seemed sufficiently lovely in the St. Elmo neighborhood, with it’s well-preserved homes and brick buildings. All of it further confirmation of something I’ve come to believe over the past year, that Chattanooga is now much more fun than Nashville.
And what could be more fun than a museum devoted to the art and science of towing?
The Towing Museum
But first, a moment of seriousness. Out front, we encounter the “Wall of The Fallen”, a memorial dedicated to all of the tow-truck drivers who’ve lost their lives in service to others. Which, when you look at the statistics, is a horrifyingly large number, an average of 60 per year according to AAA. Meaning, tow-truck drivers are more likely to get killed or injured in the line of duty than cops or firefighters.
This is the sort of public art I really appreciate.
With that sobering thought behind us, it was into the museum, where a $10 admission bought me all of the tow-truck-abilia I could possibly stand.
The first thing I learned was that the tow truck was invented in Chattanooga by Ernest Holmes, Sr., an auto mechanic who, in 1916, attached a couple of booms and a hoist to his 1913 Cadillac and used it to drag cars out of ditches and back to his shop. Holmes took a drafting course from Georgia Tech, patented his invention in 1918 and then built the tow-truck industry from scratch. It’s a real American story, one of those ones where an Alabama poor boy with a grammar-school education gets rich on a good idea.
A 1913 Cadillac with a Holmes Company wrecker rig.
The Ernest Holmes Corporation quickly became the largest manufacturer of tow trucks in the world, and Ernest Holmes, Sr., ran the company until his death in 1945, prospering even during the Great Depression. His son, Ernest Holmes, Jr., with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, was then president until it was sold in 1973.
But that was not the end of Holmes family ingenuity, as Earnest Junior’s sons, Jerry and Bill Holmes, also Georgia Tech engineers, started a new company in 1974, where they developed the first hydraulic wreckers, the current industry standard. (Oddly, the Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech predates the Holmes family’s association with the institution.) Eventually, the Holmes brothers’ Century Wrecking was acquired by Miller Industries, which still sells wreckers under both the Holmes and Century brands, produced in its manufacturing plant just outside Chattanooga.
This exciting industrial history, of inventions, manufacturing, mergers and acquisitions, is what the International Towing and Recovery Museum specializes in, telling the story of the men (and the few women) who pioneered the towing industry.
As I tell my historiography students, industrial history is really difficult to do, because corporations toss out their records all the time, especially when they go out of business. But, thanks to the Holmes family, the history of the tow truck industry in Chattanooga seems to be remarkably well documented. The museum even has a tow-truck research library!
Research ahoy!
Of course, you really came to see the trucks, of which there are many. My favorite was a 1929 Packard mounted with a 3-ton Manley crane, just a beautiful machine.
Beautiful
A less exciting part of the museum is the Hall of Fame, where the great men of towing are given their due.
The curators need to pay better attention to grammar and spelling. I caught several careless mistakes in the exhibits.
And, yes, the great men of towing look pretty much as you would expect…
Towing Industry luminaries
Taken all together, the International Towing and Recovery Museum is good for about 90 minutes of solid entertainment and towing industry enlightenment. It’s a thoroughly American sort of place, where the history of cars, innovation and humble people boot-strapping themselves into wealth is well told. It’s not terribly sophisticated, but neither is the story it’s telling. It’s worth a visit if you’re in Chattanooga and have some time to kill before visiting Rock City.
Thanks for reading. I’m also on Twitter. See you soon.
Here’s something I wrote a few weeks ago for my friends at the Nashville Pamphleteer.
Who names a high-end restaurant after a Biblical plague? In 12South? You can tell that chef Trevor Moran isn’t from around these parts, because as soon as you mention the word “locust” to a real Southerner they start thinking about painting their door jambs red, not about eating fourteen-dollar, desiccated tuna crackers. Such is the power of Sunday school. (By way of disclosure, I’m not a real Southerner, either, just a life-long member of the Churches of Christ, thus accounting for my encyclopedic knowledge of God’s wrath.)
Speaking of God’s wrath, may it rain down upon the real estate nabobs who are turning 12South into yet one more semi-urban, cookie-cutter Nowheresville. Apparently, in the 21st Century, everywhere is destined to look like everywhere else, as anything local, quirky, or notable is whirled into a pink slurry and extruded into the blandest 5-over-1, mixed-use casings. If the world were just, an Old Testament God would afflict everyone at Cushman and Wakefield with disfiguring boils. Instead, we get Locust the Restaurant—in its own way, one of the lesser plagues of modernity.
Oh, don’t mistake me. The food at Locust is both inventive and tasty, the surroundings are moderately inoffensive, and the service is sufficiently obsequious. The problem is that Locust has nothing that ties it to Nashville. In fact, there’s nothing that ties it to anywhere. It floats in a clear broth of smug self-regard, the amniotic fluid of the international over-class.
You could take Locust, with its Danish-modern design, Irish chef, and sorta-Japanese-inspired menu, and plunk it down in any gentrifying neighborhood in the world, from Buenos Aires to Berlin. It’s as much a franchise outlet of the 21st century’s homogenizing trends as Raising Cane’s or Shake Shack. It’s a byproduct of too much money and too little authenticity, more a phenomenon of social media than physical reality.
“But, it’s the New Nashville,” shout the people who need to be quiet.
“Hush your mouth, dummy. Have some respect for the recently deceased.”
Having said all that, Locust does turn out some pretty good food. I know this because we ate everything on the menu. This is apparently the thing you do at Locust if you’re a party of more than one, the menu being only six items long. The occasion was my youngest daughter’s 17th birthday, and the reservation only had to be made two months in advance. That’s because, last year, the magazine Food & Wine named Locust their “Restaurant of the Year,” a pronouncement best greeted with a shrug.
The minimalist menu at Locust, November 2022
But back to the food. One thing I do appreciate about chef Trevor Moran is his take-it-or-lump-it attitude to his diners. He’s decided to run this restaurant his way and cook what he wants, presumably within the parameters of owner Strategic Hospitality’s marketing spreadsheets. Happily, that means that we get very good Asian dumplings (made of lamb when I visited), superb steak tartare, and probably the second-best Dover sole I’d ever eaten. (Behind a sole meunière cooked tableside in the old Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas, circa 1992.) I was, on the other hand, underwhelmed by the “crispy tuna”, a piece of dried tuna loin on a cracker, and the shrimp toast.
Perhaps it was because we ate on a Sunday night, but it seemed like some aspects were being phoned in. For example, the steak tartare wasn’t accompanied by the freeze-dried capers that various reviews had waxed eloquent about. We were given, instead, bits of generic puffed rice that lacked any zip. Likewise, previous manifestations of the Dover sole were served with a seafood butter sauce that included lobster. Our $70 Dover sole came with… a piece of flatbread. Yes, that flatbread was prepared by Jeremy the Hunky Sous-chef, in a tiny Ooni pizza oven close to our table, a fact that thrilled my teenaged daughter. But, no, even if that flatbread were made by an ancient Syrian grandmother from hand-ground heirloom wheat, it wouldn’t have been a good or appropriate side for that wondrously delicate fish.
Flatbread and Dover Sole
In general, the price-to-satisfaction ratio was not in Locust’s favor. $360 for three people is not the worst, nor was it a deal, since we left hungry. Happily, I am not paying for my meal. That duty falls to V. Davis Hunt, the XIIIth, the eccentric boy billionaire publisher of the Nashville Pamphleteer, a man who has decided to sacrifice his family wealth on the Altar of Folly (A.K.A. “local journalism”).
A final note, there is one thing that definitely should not be missed at Locust, the kakigori, the Japanese shaved ice. It was everything that the meal was not, under-touted and overwhelmingly good. What arrived at our table was a pillowy mass of shaved ice flavored with passionfruit, salted caramel, honeycomb, and topped with a sweetened egg yolk. It was spectacularly good. If everything else at Locust had lived up to that standard, this would have been counted as one of the best meals of my life. Instead, it was one of the best desserts of my life, and that ain’t nothing.
Yes, after a lengthy and shameful slumber I am back to writing things that may, or may not, amuse people. Please bear with me as I overcome sloth. Also, follow me on Twitter if you’re so inclined. See you next week.
After a little more than a six weeks of copious tomatoes, things in the garden have taken a turn for the distressing. My tomatoes have come down with the vegetable version of monkeypox.
Blighty!
Two weeks ago, everything looked good out there. I had more tomatoes than I could deal with, but now it’s the Waste Land. (“August is the cruelest month, breeding blight into the tomatoes…”) The plants are keeling over, and the tomatoes are rotting on the vine. Big patches of earth are appearing where there should be greenery.
There are so many tomato diseases—fungi, blights, mildews—that I can’t be certain which of these is ravaging my tomato patch. It’s probably something called "southern blight”, but I don’t know. I’m not an agronomist. I’m not even a very good home gardenist.
Death in August
My coworker Neal, who lives three or four blocks from me, reports that his tomatoes have likewise been afflicted. So, I’m not alone in this. The whole neighborhood is being punished by God for its presumptuousness. Or, it might be my soil is cursed by the restless Native American ghosts evicted from their graves. I’m open to the possibility of supernatural causes.
Given that southern blight, like most other tomato plagues, stays in the soil over the winter and will reappear in the same spot in subsequent years, I’ll probably have to switch to raised beds next spring. There aren’t enough sunny places in my backyard for me to dig new garden beds, unless I cut down some of my neighbor’s trees. That’s probably impractical, given that she’s a light sleeper and chainsaws are loud.
My neighbor seems like a nice old lady, but she could be a witch who has cursed my harvest. (As a medieval historian, I know that witches are famous for doing just that.) In that case, if she is a witch, it might be possible to solve two problems with one good ducking, but only if I can get the city authorities do their duty regarding witch infestations.
“Notable villanies” like cursing a neighbor’s tomatoes.
Unfortunately, despite my ignorance of science and latent superstition, crop failure is always a commentary on the farmer and his abilities. Thus, it’s only natural that one would seek to blame others for his misfortunes. Absent supernatural causes, it seems most likely that my garden hygiene was poor. I didn’t stake my plants correctly and didn’t pay attention to how the leaves were drooping onto the damp soil following the big rain we had a couple weeks ago. My reward for laziness is tomato death. That’s harsh.
Yes, of course, if I really wanted some tomatoes I could go to the farmers market and buy tomatoes, but I refuse to do so on principle. I would rather not eat tomatoes than eat someone else’s during the late summer, when my own tomatoes should be bounteous.
The most important thing, however, is that Nature is now depriving me of my daily tomato sandwich. She is a cruel mistress.
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Sunday night, I finally got around to watching Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis movie and it’s a real humdinger. I’ve been a giant Baz Luhrmann fan ever since I saw Moulin Rouge in 2001, and laughed out loud at Jim Broadbent singing “Like a Virgin”. And I still think Romeo+Juliet is the best version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ever put on film.
Having said that, I consider Elvis to be Luhrmann’s masterpiece, the best movie he’s ever made. It’s both a movie worthy of adulation and a work of peculiar genius.
Like all of Baz’s movies, especially Moulin Rouge, Elvis is a brilliant glittering plaything of a film, completely captivating and chaotic; ridiculous, charming and aggravating at the same time. To fully enjoy this movie you have to let yourself go and bathe in the imagery and music, because if you stop to think about it, if only for a second, you’ll realize how silly it really is. Although, silliness is not a stinging criticism, since Baz cultivates silliness in his movies. (Jim Broadbent singing “Like a Virgin” and Tom Hanks in a fat suit as Colonel Tom Parker.)
Most of the reviews I’ve read of Elvis are dumb. They misunderstand what Baz is about as an artist. For example, this is not a movie about the “real” Elvis Presley, whoever that might have been. Luhrmann is absolutely unconcerned with psychological or emotional depth. He’s obsessed, instead, with entertaining his audience, and Elvis Presley is the mythic vehicle of that entertainment, turned up to the maximum volume.
Like Moulin Rouge, Elvis is a movie about sex appeal and sex-as-entertainment, and Elvis Presley is the pinnacle of 20th century sex-as-entertainment. No one else comes close in terms of raw sexiness, and because of the fracturing of mass media, no one will ever again be as universally sexy as the 20-year-old Elvis. The only serious competitors to young Elvis are 30-year-old Elvis in leather pants, and 40-year-old, Elvis in a sequined white jumpsuit.
And this is even before we acknowledge that he was also a singular musical genius.
You may not like it, but this is what peak male sexiness looks like.
Unfortunately, the complete, triumphant sexiness of young Elvis gets lost in the mockery heaped on the tragic fat Elvis. We forget just how sexy Elvis was, because he destroyed himself in the worst way possible, by getting fat and pathetic. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, who were both roughly half as sexy as Elvis, and one tenth as important, avoided that fate by dying young and beautiful.
It’s obvious to me, as it should be to any decent critic, that Baz is doing everything possible to give us back the sexy Elvis. That’s his objective, to make us understand again how charismatic Elvis was, while entertaining us maximally.
The first thirty minutes of this movie are brilliant, one of the best and most entertaining half-hours ever, and it focuses entirely on the unexpected, God-given sexiness of Elvis. (Elvis’s mother Gladys even says it’s a gift from God.) Elvis doesn’t cultivate it, he doesn’t even intend it, he just has it, like a Greek hero. Like Achilles or Hercules, he’s a demigod, blessed with a gift revealed to him in young adulthood. Or, maybe, not just a demigod, but a real god: primordial Eros, the son of Chaos, who wields a terrifying generative power.
Austin Butler, the best movie Elvis ever, is astonishingly good looking. In repose, better looking than the real Elvis. But, Austin Butler has to be almost super-naturally good looking to convey the almost super-natural charisma of the young Elvis, to give the audience some sense of that mysterious force that, literally—not figuratively— changed America. I’m not joking. American cultural history can be divided into B.E. and A.E., Before Elvis and After Elvis. No American has ever been as culturally important as Elvis. If you don’t believe me, name someone who’s more influential.
So, Baz Luhrmann is giving us back Elvis, the real Elvis. Not the psychologically complex, actual human being Elvis Presley, but the real Elvis Presley of pop culture, as he existed in the 1950’s and 60’s, stripped of the post-death cultural baggage and mockery. Baz is inviting us to see Elvis as he was in his prime, from the viewpoint of a naive viewer encountering him for the first time. And, Baz does it.
I saw the movie on Sunday night with my daughters, age 16 and 18, and both loved it and couldn’t stop talking about it. (Nor could I.) It was the third theater viewing for my sixteen year old. This level of devotion to the movie is apparently not unusual among teenagers. My daughters tell me that dozens of their friends are now obsessed with both the movie and Elvis Presley. One friend of theirs, a sharp young woman of 18, has seen the movie 10 times, and a 19-year-old cousin is now watching all of Elvis’s movies and reading everything ever written about him, starting with the masterful Last Train to Memphis.
Do you get that? Teenage girls (teenagers!) now think Elvis Presley is cool.
Thanks to Baz Luhrmann and his brilliant movie, teenagers understand Elvis Presley better than most American cultural critics do. Sneering at Elvis is the mark of the uncool, Okay Boomer midwit. Understanding Elvis is peak sexiness is the new hotness.
To which I say, thank you, Baz, for putting the King back on his throne.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll be back soon with something about the Tomatopocalypse. In the meantime, follow me on twitter and subscribe if you haven’t done so already, and thank you if you have. Cheers!
In Part I—published last week—I noted that chicken and waffles is historically three different dishes: creamed chicken and waffles, broiled chicken and waffles, and fried chicken and waffles, each of which had its moment in the sun.
Of the three, it’s probably broiled chicken and waffles that had the greatest fame in the mid-19th century. The most celebrated purveyor of broiled chicken and waffles was Warriner’s Tavern in Springfield, Massachusetts, an old fashioned coaching inn run by Jeremy “Uncle Jerry” Warriner and his wife Phoebe.
Aside from the fact that people were writing poetry about the tastiness of Aunt Phoebe’s chicken and waffles for decades after her death, what was most interesting was that Springfield, Massachusetts, wasn’t below the Mason-Dixon line. Remember, chicken and waffles are supposed to be the “most complete expression of Southern culinary skill”, not a dish that made “modest fortunes” in the land of the bean and the cod. So, what was the secret ingredient in Aunt Phoebe’s broiled chicken and waffles that made them so delicious? In two words: runaway slaves.
If you remember your U.S. History I, Western Massachusetts was a hotbed of abolitionism, and Springfield was ground zero, a place where John Brown sharpened his madness before heading out to make Kansas bleed. The Warriners were staunch abolitionists and their tavern a major stop on the Underground Railroad. We know that Aunt Phoebe’s kitchen was staffed with African-American women who in a previous life had probably been plantation cooks, or at least trained by plantation cooks. As I showed you in Part I, or rather as David S. Shields showed you in his book Southern Provisons: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine, plantation cooks were likely the best chefs in America, rivaled only by a few French chefs in New Orleans and New York.
We also know the names of at least two of the African-American cooks at Uncle Jerry’s: Mary Sly and Emily, the latter a virtuoso pastry chef. Emily’s full identity has eluded me. Mary Sly, however, is better known. In 1855, she was one of a number of fugitives who were living in Florence, 20 miles north of Springfield, a village famous for it’s liberty-minded residents such as Sojourner Truth.
Sly, said to have been born in either New Orleans or Natchez, worked for a time at the tavern run by Jeremy Warriner in Springfield; she escaped from her owner, a “Col. Trask,” and it may be at that time that she came to Florence, where she was listed in the 1855 state census.
This is where I ended Part I, noting that the man who had once owned Mary Sly was a congregant at the same church as Uncle Jerry and Aunt Phoebe, the First Congregational Church in Springfield, where the Reverend Samuel Osgood, an ardent abolitionist, presided.
Colonel Israel Eliot Trask, New England Industrialist; Mississippi Planter
Colonel Israel E. Trask was one of those ambitious, energetic Massachusetts Yankees that turned up everywhere in the 19th century, from Santa Barbara to Shanghai, seizing the main chance with both hands and not letting go. The son of a Revolutionary War veteran and prominent surgeon, young Trask had been educated at Yale, trained as a lawyer, and briefly served in the Army. He was on the edge of heading off to France in 1801 when Alexander Hamilton suggested he go to Mississippi instead, and he did. Once there, he fell in with the right crowd, married a planter’s daughter and acquired two huge plantations, one near Natchez and the other closer to New Orleans.
In 1812, after making a fortune growing cotton, Trask turned the management of his plantations over to his brother and headed back to Massachusetts, where, in an early example of vertical integration, he opened a cotton mill. Yes, Israel E. Trask was both a southern planter and a Yankee industrialist, a career trajectory that was not as uncommon as you might imagine.
This is the place where I point out something you might not have thought about. Springfield was a hotbed of abolition because Massachusetts fortunes were being made on the backs of enslaved people, directly in the case of men like Col. Trask, and indirectly through the ownership of cotton mills. In fact, the Deep South—Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana—was lousy with transplanted New Englanders, men like Edwin T. Merrick, another Springfield-lawyer-turned-Louisiana-planter, who was the Chief Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Rather than surrender the court to the hated Yankees, when Union General Benjamin “Beast” Butler (another Massachusetts lawyer) entered New Orleans, Merrick took the court into exile in Confederate-held Shreveport and kept it operating until the end of the war.
Because of the close familial and commercial ties between Southern cotton planters and Massachusetts textile barons, and because of the unbearable heat, malaria and yellow fever in the summer, many planters, like Col. Trask, spent their winters in the South and summers in New England. And when planters like Col. Trask traveled north, they brought their lady’s maids, valets and cooks with them, which meant that the citizens of New England mill towns had more direct contact with planters and enslaved people than most other Northerners. Springfield wasn’t technically a mill town—it specialized in precision manufacturing—but it was a major transportation hub, the first stop in Massachusetts for the steamboats that went up the Connecticut River, with railroads leading outward in all directions by 1845.
State law and friendly judges meant that Massachusetts was effectively a free state; slaves who traveled with their owners could “self emancipate” as soon as they stepped off the boat. In the case of Col. Trask, self-emancipation seemed to happen more than once. I’ve not had a chance to examine the Israel E. Trask collection at Amherst College (Trask was one of the founders of the college) or the duplicates of the collection at Harvard, so I do not know if there is more to be learned about Mary Sly and whether she ran off or self emancipated. I do know, however, that Uncle Jerry’s was a place where self-emanicpation was encouraged. In fact, one of the most famous cases of recanted self-emanicipation started in the dining room at Warriner’s tavern in August of 1845.
One W. B. Hodgson, a slaveholder from Savannah (Geo.) with his lady and slave by the name of Catherine Linda, came into Springfield about three weeks since and stopped at Warriner’s U.S. Hotel. At the same time a friend from New-Bedford, a fugitive slave, in company with another family, stopped at the same place. He fell in with Catherine Linda, and soon found that she was a slave travelling with her master. She repudiated slavery, and expressed a desire to be free.
That short snippet is taken from radical abolitionist Erasmus Darwin Hudson’s account of the incident as recorded the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.
By 1844, Sojourner Truth was living in Florence, Massachusetts, a short ride from Springfield. Many forget that she was enslaved not in the South, but in upstate New York, owned by a Dutch-speaking family. So, waffles, yes; fried chicken, probably not.
Unfortunately, when Catherine Linda was given her moment before a judge who had the power to confirm her freedom, she recanted—probably because her entire family was in Georgia—and returned to the South with her master and mistress. (Oddly, Hodgson, a scholar and former American diplomat, was a gifted linguist who was familiar with most of the African languages common among slaves, including Mandigo, Ebo, Gullah and Fula.)
So, by the 1840’s, broiled chicken and waffles had been spread to the north by runaway or freed slaves, well-trained cooks like Mary Sly, who occupied key positions in celebrated eating houses, such Uncle Jerry’s Tavern. But what about fried chicken and waffles?
William Aiken Walker, Slave Cabin with Bird House
As I noted in Part One, outside of the South, young chicken was an unusual and costly treat. Below the Mason-Dixon, however, it was a common staple on breakfast tables, fried or broiled, and served with a variety of breads and biscuits, including waffles. The reason chicken was more abundant in the South was that chickens long held a special place in Southern slave society, because they were the one type of livestock enslaved people were usually allowed to own for themselves. Andrew Lawler’s 2014 book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the World, gives a good accounting of the southern chicken economy, of dunghill fowls as the key commodity in a lively commerce of eating, trading and selling carried out by enslaved people and freed blacks.
In what likely was a typical exchange, Thomas Jefferson in 1775 bought three chickens for two silver Spanish bits from two of his female slaves who worked at the Shadwell plantation. In the early 1800s, when he was away serving as president of the United States, Jefferson’s granddaughter Ann Cary Randolph recorded each purchase made while she helped manage the estate in his absence. Chickens and eggs were the item most commonly sold by slaves to the white household.
Enslaved people also grew a large range of vegetables in their garden allotments and sold the produce to their masters and others, although nothing was ever as lucrative as poultry. Here’s Andrew Lawler again.
In 1728, a white owner named Elias Ball paid one pound and fifteen shillings for eighteen chickens to his slave Abraham. A savvy businessman, Abraham then threw in one chicken for free. Planters bought up to seventy birds at a time from their human chattel.
Chickens were so lucrative that industrious slaves might, in rare cases, even be able to buy their own freedom with the earnings from their birds. Lawler wryly notes that, slaves often “had a strong economic incentive to encourage their masters to eat more chicken.”
Hungarian genre painter Géza Vastagh’s “Chickens on a Dunghill”, circa 1900
Which brings us, at long last, to the topic of fried chicken and waffles. If you want to know about the history of Southern fried chicken, go read John T. Edge’s book, Fried Chicken: An American Story, and if you want to know, in a general way, about Southern fried chicken and waffles, this passage from Adrian Miller’s book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisineis a good summary of the basic truth.
By the early 1800s, a “Virginia Breakfast,” featuring a combination of fried or baked meats with any sort of hot quick bread, was the gold standard of plantation hospitality. At these meals, fried chicken was a regular star, just as likely to be paired with a biscuit, cornbread, pancakes, or rolls as a it was with waffles. It was enslaved African American cooks who made the Virginia Breakfast possible. After Emancipation, these same cooks frequently made chicken and waffles for social events in the black community, and worked as professional cooks in elite hotels, resorts, and restaurants patronized by wealthy whites. Through their culinary talent, African American cooks effectively mainstreamed chicken and waffles by the early 1900s.
While Adrian Miller’s thesis about the genesis of chicken and waffles is solid, it’s lacking, as most of these accounts are, in specific details, probably because it’s impossible to go back much before the Civil War and find mentions that emphasize the unity of the dish.
What I mean is, accounts of plantation breakfasts might put fried chicken and waffles together on the breakfast table, but they’re usually accompanied by a host of other tasty things—from beaten biscuits to baked meats. Fried chicken and waffles is not a dish because fried chicken and waffles are not yet “a thing”, singular.
Having said all that, my best guess is that fried chicken and waffles achieves thinghood in parts of the South just before the civil war, and then takes off in the North in the mid 1870s, achieving nationwide apotheosis by the turn of the 20th century. Here are the opening lines from an antebellum short story, “Miss Polly Peablossom’s Wedding”, published in 1842 by John B. Lamar, a Georgia planter who dabbled in regional humor and died on a Maryland battlefield in 1862.
“My stars! that parson is a powerful slow a-cominng! I reckon he wa’nt so tedious in gitting to his own wedding as he is coming here,” said one of the bridesmaids of Miss Polly Peablossom, as she bit her lips to make them rosy, and peeped into a small looking-glass for the twentieth time.
“He preaches enough about the shortness of a lifetime,” remarked another pouting Miss, “and how we ought to improve our opportunities, not to be creeping along like a snail, when a whole wedding party is waiting for him, and the waffles are getting cold and the chickens are burning to a crisp”
We can thus establish that chicken and waffles were a dish suitable for serving at country weddings in antebellum Georgia, probably cooked, of course, by the slave women who ably commanded the plantation kitchens.
The big nationwide boom in fried chicken and waffles began in the 1870s, paralleling the rise of a national railroad network that eased the burdens of long-distance travel.
Before the Civil War, travel to the South largely meant taking a steamer down the Atlantic coast to Charleston or Savannah, or down the Ohio River to the Cumberland or Mississippi, and thence inland from one of the ports, sometime by local rail, but mostly by coach. In other words, it was slow and arduous, and not something to be undertaken lightly.
As long distance travel got easier after the Civil War, working in what today is called the “hospitality industry” was one of the fastest way for freed slaves and their descendants to earn a respectable living. George Pullman, of the Pullman car, exclusively hired ex-slaves as sleeping car attendants and porters, men who earned middle class wages by focusing on superior customer service. At rail stations throughout the South, many African American women also earned a decent living by selling prepared food to train passengers. Amos Gottschall, a patent medicine salesman who roamed the continent after the Civil War, was especially impressed with “waiter-carriers”, women who walked great distances with platters of food balanced on their heads.
About the first words a traveler hears as the cars stop at a station in the South, are these: “Here’s yer nice, tender chicken, hot coffee and waffles!” and the next moment, a good-natured old Sambo or Aunt Hannah comes to the car-window, carrying on his or her head a large waiter containing nicely fried chicken and waffles, as well as a shining coffee-pot full of steaming Java.
The small town of Gordonsville, Virginia, located at an intersection that connected Richmond with the Shenandoah Valley, gained fame for the quality of its fried chicken, sold trackside to passengers by an army of waiter-carriers.
Waiter-carriers selling fried chicken at Gordonsville, Virginia.
Resort hotels throughout the country hired freed slaves and their children to staff their kitchens, and canny promoters and hoteliers began to advertise Southern fried chicken dinners as a significant attraction.
By the turn of the century, the cult of fried chicken and waffles had spread to distant parts of country, to places like New York City, Western Massachusetts, and the Hale’iwa Hotel in Hawaii. (The later founded and run by Benjamin Dillingham, another Massachusetts Yankee adventurer who got rich on native land and chutzpah.) By 1920 there were several Southern restaurants, “tea rooms”, in New York City, such as the Yellow Aster, the Adelaide, the Pirouette and the Southern Tea Room, that regularly offered fried chicken and waffle dinners.
Long before Wells Supper Club opened in Harlem in 1938, New York City was host to several Southern restaurants that offered fried chicken and waffle dinners. New York Tribune, November 24, 1918
Fried chicken, with or without waffles, became so important that Jessup Whitehead, the Mark Twain of 19th century cookbook authors, considered it the essential factor in whether or not a resort succeed.
It is quite appalling to think how many men of means and brains rush into the business of keeping summer resort hotels who are and remain utterly ignorant of the fact that the first principle of resort keeping is
PLENTY OF FRIED CHICKEN
and not knowing this, they fail and the next summer the “unfortunate”, the chickenless hotel remains closed. True, your guests love other things, too. They love music and fried chicken; electric lights and bells and fried chicken; telegraph and post office in the house, and fried chicken; great elevations and pine woods and fried chicken; fine drives, all sorts of amusements and all other modern conveniences and fried chicken; but as nobody expects to get all the good things in this world at once if any of the preliminary inducements should be lacking, still if fried chicken remains, the guests will stay, too.
At the same time fried chicken and waffles were conquering the hotel business, American housewives began to up their cooking game. Post-war industrialization in the North caused wages to rise to the point that middle class families were unable to hire reliable servants at reasonable rates. One response was to import young women from Ireland, who as I showed in my piece, “The Curse of an Irish Cook”, were woefully untrained in the art of American cookery.
Biddy is unfamiliar with waffles. Harrisburg Telegraph, June 14, 1866.
Another, more common response, was for young women to get the training in cooking their mothers—who had benefited from cheap labor—did not provide. Cookbooks were thus published in great number, ladies magazines proliferated, and cooking schools sprang up across the country.
One of the first celebrity chefs to emerges in this era was Maria Parola, yet another Massachusetts native, who spent five years in Jacksonville, Florida, as a school teacher, before returning to Boston and opening Miss Parola’s School of Cooking in 1877. Her success as a lecturer, writer of cookbooks and teacher of cooking inspired many rivals, including the more famous Mary J. Lincoln and Fannie Farmer, both also based in Boston. It was Parola, however, who probably did the most to inspire Northern cooks to attempt Southern dishes. This excerpt from the St. Paul Globe, May 3, 1886, shows the esteem in which she held southern cookery.
Miss Parola, the famous exponent of common sense cookery has been making tour of the South. As a result of her investigations she declares that the women of the South are better cooks than their Northern sisters. If the lady has allowed her judgement to become prejudiced under the seductive influence of the fried chicken and waffles which form the most complete expression of Southern culinary skill, she is perhaps excusable for her evidently biased statement.
So, there you are. By 1886, fried chicken and waffles was considered, rightly or wrongly, “the most complete expression of Southern culinary skill.” The thinghood of fried chicken and waffles had finally been achieved.
Note that praise for the dish was being given to Southern housewives, not to plantation cooks, for the obvious reason that this was a generation after the Emancipation Proclamation, a generation during which the impoverished South, unlike the more prosperous North, had not experienced an economic boom. Miss Parola’s assessment that Southern women were better cooks than Northern women was likely because Southern women had fewer servants after the war and more hands-on experience at the art of cooking. Or, more plainly stated, with talented slave-cooks freed, middle class Southern women had to do their own cooking, and as a result became good at it.
Fried chicken and waffles also gained in popularity among home cooks because of improved technology. Baking powder, newfangled patent waffle irons and gas stoves were making it easier for housewives to prepare waffles at home.
Originally, the old-fashioned yeast batters had to be prepared well in advance of cooking, and long-handled waffle irons wielded in open fireplaces made the actual cooking a difficult and sometimes dangerous task, which was why waffles were considered such as special dish, why they could only be made by people with lengthy training in the art of wafflery and why plantation breakfasts, of which they were a prominent part, were so often cited as the peak of luxury.
Aunt Jemima self-rising pancake and waffle mix was a technological solution marketed squarely to housewives who had to cook their own meals. Everyone acknowledged that the best waffles had always been made by black cooks, and no one else. Thus the image of Aunt Jemima promised to make an almost impossible task easy.
Here, I probably should address the Aunt Jemima problem because it ties together so much of what we’ve been talking about: post-Civil War industrialization, housewives cooking breakfast, the spread of Southern food culture and the role of African-American women in it. But, I’m not going to. It’s too wickedly complex to treat in a fluffy piece on chicken and waffles. Instead, go read Toni Tipton-Martin’s book The Jemima Code. It’s worth your while because Tipton-Martin reminds us that there are two sides to the stereotype of the black mammy. On the one side, the offensive racial caricature that reduces African-American women to perpetual happy servitude while reasserting white dominance; on the other, the genuine feelings of warmth that many white Southerners felt for the black women who raised and fed them. The caricature is racially offensive, but the positive emotions were genuine, and both things exist in the same space at the same time.
The letters of Israel Trask, the Massachusetts mill owner/Mississippi planter, catch something of what the novelist Kathryn Stockett refers to as, “the dichotomy of love and disdain living side-by-side.”
Trask’s letters home speak in familiar terms about the individual slaves, their health, and living conditions. He wrote of slaves’ frequent inquiries about his wife and children—the “Missis” and “Massa Wm. and Ed”—and of sharing food with the “young negroes.” James Trask, a brother who managed the family’s extensive Mississippi holdings, spoke of “our Black family.” The labor force at the Massachusetts mills is never discussed in such personal terms.
As I tell my students, slavery is inhumane but human. It’s an ancient evil system devised by humans in an era before industrialization. But because human emotions are complex and irreducible, familial affection can exist between oppressor and oppressed, which is why slavery is so horrifying and why it corrupts so thoroughly. For the past 130 years, Aunt Jemima has been the echo of that fraught familial connection, ripped from its terrible context and turned into commercial success by advertisers and industrialists.
Andrew Jackson, possibly filled with chicken and waffles, kills Charles Dickenson
Let’s end this story where I started Part One, with an American president feasting on chicken and waffles. If you remember, I began by referencing the 1867 meeting of future president William McKinnley and his future bride Ida Mae Sexton, which happened at “a chicken and waffle supper, for which the old hotel at the lake was famous throughout several counties.” The lake in question was Meyer’s Lake, three miles west of downtown Canton, Ohio. Meanwhile six miles west of Meyer’s Lake was the city of Massillon, Ohio, a hive of Quakerism and one of the most important cities on the Underground Railroad, and a place where many escaped and freed slaves settled, both before and after the war. And, you can see where this is heading… who it is I believe probably cooked the chicken and waffles at Meyers Lake. Needless to say, there’s more work to be done on the hidden history of African-American cooks in post-Civil War America.
And, now, finally, the denouement. What may be the earliest reference to fried chicken and waffles being eaten together is found in the biography of another American president, History of Andrew Jackson: Pioneer, Patriot, Soldier, Politician, President, written by Augustus C. Buell and published in 1904.
Buell records the following..
They arrived late — about 8 p.m. — at the tavern. The General ate a hearty supper of fried chicken, waffles and sweet potatoes, with coffee. After supper he lounged about on the piazza smoking his corn-cob pipe and chatting with the citizens until 10 o’clock. Then he went to bed, was asleep in ten minutes, and had to be shaken pretty rudely to wake him up at five in the morning. His breakfast was light—only one hot biscuit, two eggs and one cup of coffee.
We know the exact date of this supposed meal, Thursday, May 29, 1806, because the next morning, Friday, May 30, 1806, Andrew Jackson killed fellow Tennessee planter and rival horse breeder, Charles Dickenson, in a duel at Harrison’s Mills near Adairville, Kentucky. The night before the duel, Jackson had stayed at David Miller’s Tavern, located on the Red River, just across the Tennessee-Kentucky state line. Dueling was forbidden in Tennessee, but not Kentucky, hence the need for overnight accommodations. If Buell’s account of Old Hickory’s dinner is correct, it’s evidence of someone eating fried chicken and waffles at the very beginning of the 19th century.
Unfortunately, it’s almost certainly a fabrication. None of the 19th century biographers of Jackson mention dinner at Miller’s Tavern, and those that that do, like James Parton, are content to say that Jackson “ate heartily,” without naming the dishes.
Far worse, Augustus Caesar Buell, who had written several popular biographies of major American figures, was revealed after his death to have been a fabulist of some ability and industry. He long dined out on having been a lieutenant colonel of a New York regiment during the Civil War, but had never made it past corporal. His best-selling biography of Revolutionary war hero, John Paul Jones, was so filled with lies that Harvard history-professor-turned-admiral, Samuel Eliot Morison, devoted an entire appendix to debunking them. So Buell’s account of a dinner of chicken and waffles, sweet potatoes and coffee, is a probably a lie.
Yet, I think it’s telling that Buell, a native New Yorker who barely made it to the South, chose chicken and waffles as Jackson’s pre-duel meal. Telling, because by 1900, chicken and waffles had jumped the Mason-Dixon Line and had become a “thing”, a very big thing, in the rest of the United States. In fact, it had become the dish most closely identified with Southern cuisine, avidly desired by millions and widely acknowledged by most as the “complete expression of Southern culinary skill”.
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