When: August 24
National Waffle Day on August 24 celebrates the breakfast classic that improved upon the pancake by adding structure — and then became the base for fried chicken, ice cream, and anything else that benefits from a sturdy, textured platform.
Thomas Jefferson came home from France with a waffle iron and changed American breakfast. Then a company called Eggo finished the job.
Waffle irons appear in European records from the 13th and 14th centuries — iron plates hinged together, held over open coals, used to bake thin, crisp cakes. The grid pattern was not decorative: the raised grid created more surface area, produced a crispier exterior, and formed the pockets that hold butter and syrup. By the 16th century, waffle sellers worked the crowds outside Dutch and Belgian churches on feast days, and recipes appeared in some of the earliest printed European cookbooks. The Dutch brought wafels to New Amsterdam in the 1600s, and the waffle entered the American kitchen early. Thomas Jefferson came home from France in 1789 with a long-handled waffle iron and introduced what he called the "waffle frolic" to Virginia society — waffle parties that became fashionable in the early republic. Whether Jefferson deserves credit for popularizing the waffle in America or simply for throwing good parties is debatable. Either way, the waffle frolic was apparently a real event...