11/11/2023 0 Comments Hardees biscuit and gravy recipe![]() To make enough noodles to serve with 1 chicken, I doubled that recipe, using 2 cups of sifted flour, 2 eggs, etc. This recipe is from an old, old, OLD edition of “Better Homes and Gardens NEW COOK BOOK.” It is old enough that the edition is unidentifiable. And so I present to you my mom’s response when I asked her for the recipe for homemade noodles. The glory of this dish is in the toothsomeness of thick, rustic, chewy homemade noodles. I would be remiss if I went along with all the recipe blogs out there and told you you could use dried or frozen egg noodles for this dish. You don’t really need a recipe for this dish, which is good since this isn’t a recipe blog, and yet. But it was brought so strongly to mind by my research into the Harold that I had to make it and I hope you don’t mind a slight digression along our path to sandwich enlightenment. I hadn’t eaten this dish–let’s just call it chicken and noodles–in years. Carbs and fat on carbs and fat, the ultimate comfort food, and a Midwestern farmer’s ideal vehicle for the day’s calories. Essentially, it consisted of thick chewy homemade egg noodles served with shredded meat in gravy over a bed of mashed potatoes. When my stepfather Ronnie’s family would gather, this dish would be on the table, often made from leftover turkey or whatever roast had been on the table in the past day or two. I’ve seen the dish I’m thinking of referenced online as “Amish chicken and noodles” or similar phrases. In this way the Harold reminds me a great deal of a dish I remember fondly that Grandma Dorothy used to make, though the two things are not really very alike at all. Supper, the final meal of the day, would be the lightest, as the day’s work had already been completed. At dinner (the midday meal many of us will know as lunch) they’d come in from the field to load up on fat and carbs again. Like Harold, the typical Midwestern farmer of old would tuck into a big breakfast around 4am and already be out in the field by the time the sun came up. Midwestern foods traditionally tend toward calorie-laden piles of fat and carbs, fuel a farmer needs to work the fields all day, and farmers traditionally tend toward getting those calories in early. It also just makes sense for the Harold to be a farmer’s breakfast. Today, we right this wrong.) A Delicious Digression (Incidentally, the picture attached to this tweet was the only photograph I could find online of an actual Harold from Hardee’s. #RIP #secretmenu #legendary #unauthorized #stillinquincy #biscuits #scrambledeggs #gravy #hashbrowns #3am #alcohol /Z3qMmD4fvA- It's Mike November 13, 2017 The Hardee's in Macomb IL has closed down. People in Chicago do not know Hardee’s though.) Elliott Bambrough from local foodie show Chicago’s Best recorded a version served briefly by Southwest suburban breakfast spot The Baked Apple on his Instagram as well. Denny’s? I’m not sure there’s ever been a Denny’s in Macomb. The Four Moon Tavern in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood lists an item called “HAROLD” on their brunch menu, “biscuits & gravy with two fried eggs on top.” A blog post from 2005 shows that this item has been served there for some time (and that the principle of the Telephone Game is real. Some of those students from WIU returned to their hometowns and opened restaurants and began serving their own takes also. The name caught on and spread, and soon other Hardee’s in the Western Illinois area, including those in my hometown of Quincy, began serving them as well. Some of the students noticed Harold’s eponymous custom breakfast and began ordering it for themselves. ![]() To a college student, away from the restrictions of home life for the first time, 4am is often the time one is stumbling back from a house party, looking for some greasy, salty carbs to help soak up the night’s misadventures. ![]() However, Macomb is also home to one of Illinois’ public universities, WIU. In a farming community like Macomb and many of the other small Midwestern towns around it, 4am is a perfectly reasonable time to be eating breakfast. Sometime in the early 1980s, or so the story goes, at the Hardee’s in Macomb, Illinois, a farmer named Harold would come in every day at 4am and order a special Frankenstein dish of his own concoction: biscuits and gravy topped with scrambled eggs and Hardee’s “Hash Rounds”–sort of a flattened tater tot.
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