(upbeat music) [Cecilia] Something magical happens when you sink your teeth into a perfectly golden fried piece of chicken.

Perfectly seasoned on the outside, sitting on top of waffles.

Fluffy, with just the right amount of sweetness, that salty sweet goodness creates an irresistible power couple for your taste buds.

There's nothing better.

Folks today may think of it as a Southern comfort food, or a soul dish, or that it started in Harlem, but it goes back to the founding of this country.

So let's dig into the juicy backstory of how this scrumptious combo became a bonafide American classic.

Today we're going to talk to Geoff Davis.

He's a James Beard-nominated chef and the founder of Burdell Soul Food.

We're gonna get his unique take on chicken waffles.

(upbeat music) The name of the restaurant is Burdell, that was your grandmother's first name?

[Geoff] Yeah, it was named after her, and it's really the spirit of, like, both of my grandmothers.

[Cecilia] You do a really unique take on chicken and waffles.

What do you even call your dish?

Do you call it chicken and waffles?

[Geoff] We call it chicken liver and waffles, and it has maple syrup vinegarette, fried chicken skin, crispy shallots, and then a cornmeal waffle.

Definitely wanted to do a version of the dish because I think it's a really emblematic soul food dish.

[Cecilia] The history of chicken and waffles, what do you know about it?

[Geoff] I know a portion of the history, especially surrounding Harlem and kind of like late night food for jazz musicians.

[Cecilia] Chef Davis is right, Harlem plays a huge role in the popularity of the dish we all know and love today, but that's actually the end of the story.

Before we get to Harlem and the jazz musicians, we actually have to start, you guessed it, in Amish country, also known as Pennsylvania Dutch country.

And that's because of the waffles.

[Howard] Waffles, of course, are like a Germanic Dutch dish.

And they get brought to the United States with Dutch and German immigrants and are picked up first in the Northeast.

[Cecilia] By Northeast we mean New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

[William] What we call the Dutch country, it's the same size as Switzerland, and it is about as varied as it can be.

Each county has its own food specialties.

It's a melange of different German-speaking people.

It all melded together.

[Howard] The thing about waffles is we think of them as convenience food.

My daughter gobbles Lego waffles like they're going out of style, but in fact, you know, waffles are really difficult to make.

[Cecilia] We learned that back in the day, waffles were an ultimate New Year's dish.

We're talking about a time when eggs and top notch flour were really rare gems.

All those fancy ingredients and the time it took to make was reserved for only special occasions.

[Howard] Back in the day they would've been made with yeast, you would've started the day before.

And then the long handled sort of pincher-looking waffle irons you might see in an antique store, incredibly difficult to use correctly.

You have to turn them frequently with the possibility you might be burning the waffle.

One of the great triumphs of modern food is the democratization of waffles.

[Cecilia] So we have the Dutch to thank for bringing their waffles to America.

And I'm getting excited, because it is time to see how Chef Davis makes his waffles unique.

(upbeat music) [Geoff] We use this really awesome cornmeal that we get from Tierra Vegetables Farm.

It's made with a variety of corn called Bloody Butcher.

[Cecilia] Bloody Butcher?

[Geoff] It's one of the oldest heirloom corn varieties, like, on record that was written about back in the 1800s and used in a recipe.

So it's a red corn, and it just has amazing flavor, and we cook it 80% of the way.

And on the pickup we fry it to kind of get, like, a perfect crisp on the outside.

[Cecilia] Wow, you fry it?

[Geoff] Uh-huh.

[Cecilia] Like, deep fry it?

[Geoff] Yeah.

[Cecilia] What?

[Geoff] Yeah.

[Cecilia] I'm excited to see the color of this waffle.

The Dutch didn't just bring waffles.

They also brought their recipe for chicken and waffles.

(upbeat music continues) The earliest records of this dish date back to the 1600s, but here's the kicker, before chicken took the spotlight in the U.S., it was all about catfish.

[William] The catfish and waffle houses were very popular before the Civil War, we have all sorts of references to that.

One country hotel started doing catfish and waffle dinners, they would make money.

Other hotels would then copy.

People would come out of the city and enjoy that.

[Cecilia] The fact that fish is seasonal, led to catfish being kind of a pain to use for this dish.

And of course, because this dish is so well-loved, we had to figure something out.

Enter the chicken.

[Andrew] To follow the chicken is to follow human history.

People first developed a love of chicken because they ate the bugs that infested fields.

They didn't eat the grain, so they were not a threat or a pest.

They, in fact, were an ally.

[Tonya] Chickens enter Americas through multiple points at different times.

Chickens get introduced via the Portuguese and Spaniards, but through the African slave trade.

[Andrew] African enslaved people were very familiar with chicken because the chicken was common in West Africa.

And most of the enslaved people who came to colonial Virginia, in particular, came from the West African coast.

[Tonya] As chickens became more domesticated and cultivated in the United States, it was African Americans who were the keepers of the chickens.

They were mostly valued for their eggs.

[Andrew] Because it was the one animal who were allowed.

So, the enslaved Africans brought this knowledge with them to the United States and because who were the people cooking in the plantation kitchens?

[Howard] Best chefs in America in the Antebellum 19th century, the early 19th century, would've been two groups, French chefs who worked at fancy restaurants, and then the second category would've been slave cooks.

The chief cook of a plantation would've been as well trained and as skillful as any French chef in America.

[Cecilia] When talking to historians, we learned that there were many famous enslaved cooks going as far back as the time of George Washington, like his chef named Hercules Posey, who were really famous for their cooking skills.

And even Thomas Jefferson had a famous chef named James Hemings, the brother of Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl he took with him to France.

Jefferson loved waffles so much that he brought back a bunch of waffle irons and had James trained by French chefs to make his favorite dishes.

The African American legacy in the culinary arts runs so deep in this country.

(quirky music) I think that one of the things that I found really interesting about this dish for you, talking about being who you are and the places that you've worked, you didn't necessarily want to be the person who made this dish.

[Geoff] Soul food, people think of it as a simple food.

It's heavy, it's unhealthy, it doesn't take that much skill to make it, it's cheap.

I struggled with the idea of cooking this food because it didn't feel as important as European food.

And I think like five or six years ago, if you would've asked me, like, I would've opened like a French bistro or an Italian restaurant.

[Cecilia] Oh, really?

[Geoff] Just getting more comfortable with the idea of this food is valuable.

I mean, this food really is one of the great cuisines of the world, and hasn't really been represented in a great light.

Just like doing it in my grandparents' memory.

[Cecilia] That's beautiful.

(laughs) [Geoff] Yeah, we're trying to define ourselves as something that's a little different.

So we make chicken liver mousse with, it's a really classic kind of, like, French style of making mousse.

So the livers get sauteed in butter, and then we pass it through a fine sieve, and cool it down, and then we pipe that onto the plate.

[Cecilia] That sounds so good.

(laughs) That's amazing.

[Andrew] Now waffles were not really a Southern thing, okay?

There weren't many Germans in the South.

[Cecilia] So if waffles were mainly found in the Northeast, and enslaved Africans were making fried chicken in the South, how did they end up together?

[Tonya] We need to look at the Virginia plantation kitchen table as how the two even are in proximity.

[Howard] And the story of chicken and waffles has a lot to do with runaway slaves.

A lot of chicken and waffles spread along the Underground Railroad.

[Cecilia] Since there is a preservative factor when frying chicken, it travels well, which would have probably been helpful for enslaved Africans who are trying to escape to freedom up North.

After the Civil War ended, emancipated African Americans found it hard to live in the South due to Jim Crow laws.

[Tonya] There is a lot of domestic terrorism in the South.

That's intended to oppress recently-freed, emancipated African Americans who are trying to assert their rights.

[Andrew] You have what was the largest internal migration in American history.

You have millions and millions of people voting with their feet, leaving the farms around the South where they lived.

[Cecilia] And one place where African Americans migrated to- [Tonya] Harlem really is the Black capital of the world.

It's the prime destination when the Great Migration happens.

It's how we have jazz, it's how we have the Harlem Renaissance.

So Harlem is this physical, tangible, geographic place, but it's also this mythical place that lives in the minds of Black people.

Harlem is this really special Black place.

That really chicken and waffles takes flight from there.

Wells Supper Club was the name of the place where it gets popularized.

The restaurant is said to have opened in 1938 by Ann Wells.

(relaxed music) [Cecilia] Wells was a hotspot during the jazz era.

If you stopped by, you might have seen members of the Rat Pack, like Sammy Davis Jr., who was known to have frequented the place.

And lore has it that Nat King Cole held his wedding reception there.

And may have even eaten, you guessed it, chicken and waffles.

[Tonya] The story goes, it was, you know, late at night, early in the morning, depending on how you look at it.

Jazz artists, and they're hungry, and we want breakfast, we want dinner, and everyone seems to have subsisted solely on a diet of chicken and waffles, the signature dish of Wells Supper Club.

[Cecilia] And it doesn't stop there.

This delicious dish just kept on traveling, all the way to the West Coast through a man named Herb Hudson.

[Tonya] Herb Hudson, in 1975, opens Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles.

He migrates from Harlem to Los Angeles, and that is arguably the most successful pop culture-referenced fried chicken and waffles place.

And he's classic, meaning, like, classic old-school, Virginia-style fried chicken, which found its way to Harlem.

[Cecilia] What a journey this dish has been on.

Before we leave, let's go try out Chef Davis' chicken liver and waffles, shall we?

(upbeat music) Wow.

The mousse is really rich.

I love the vinaigrette that, like, offsets it.

That's perfect.

And then you get the crunch of the chicken skin and the waffle at the same time.

Double crunch.

This is, like, the perfect little bite.

[Geoff] It's like kind of deceptively light, a lot of rich things going on and deep flavors, but it has, like, lightness to it, and drives you to take another bite.

[Cecilia] Right.

Thank you.

[Geoff] Yeah, of course.

[Cecilia] Whether you're craving soul food fried chicken and waffles, maybe a go at Pennsylvania Dutch stewed chicken and waffles, or you'd like to try Chef Davis' chicken liver and waffles, all of its magic on a plate.

With this dish, you cannot go wrong.

(upbeat music continues) If you liked this video and wanted to see more food history content, check out the show Delishtory on PBS Food YouTube channel.

Thanks for watching, and let us know in the comments which version of chicken and waffles you like.

And while you're there, don't forget to like, subscribe and tell us what dishes should we explore next beyond the menu.