Above is collection of a few of the very old historic waffle irons of various shapes, sizes and decorative patterns [not yet on display, currently BEHIND THE SCENES] at the Historic Lefferts House here in Brooklyn NY. Yes inclusive of the very waffle irons used by the enslaved cooks owned by the Lefferts family (and at least one Negro cook who continued to worked there for decades after emancipation in NY (1827) well into the 1840’s…. Stay tuned for EXCITING upcoming experiential programming I’m co-developing with Lefferts Historic House on this very topic!
Happy Waffle Iron Day?!…
Waffle irons and waffles might’ve found their way to the Americas via the Dutch way back in the day a la the early 1600’ New York City—aka New Amsterdam including Brooklyn then spelled “Breuckelen” and a few parts of the Caribbean…. But I’ll give you one "Guess Who" made most (ok, ALL...) of the waffles in America — the Americas including places the Dutch never even set foot on — before the industrial food system started serving them up in bazillions of boxes for your freezer to conveniently pop singular square (or egg shaped!) ones into your countertop toaster?... READ ON TO FIND OUT …
(To do so you’ll have to join my PATREON community at any level to read two key upfront parts of this post):
“A Brief Basic Waffle Iron History”
AND
The Waffle Iron's "Missing History"
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…in his book, “The Cooking Gene”, food history interpreter, scholar and re-enactor — my friend the amazing Mr. Micheal Twitty writes:
…. “My favorite tool to hate is the waffle iron with its exacting timing and choreographed dance of greasing, heating, pouring in batter, counting seconds, flipping it, counting again, then removing it gently as not to mar a single inch of cake…” ~ Excerpt From The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
[You can also get a glimpse of how waffle irons are associated with enslaved cooks from this 1 min YouTube video ]
But wait there’s more! Yours truly (me , Tonya , aka “The Food Griot “ 😁) touches on this for a recent KQED PBS FOOD digital episode of Beyond the Menu: “The REAL Story of Chicken and Waffles” (12 min).
Since my audio-visual contributions there are edited down into digestible sound bites in this 12 min piece, you can join my PATREON COMMUNITY if you’re interested in accessing the unedited version of all that i have to say on this topic and then some…
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