Noticing KFC ads for chicken and waffles, I remember Mildred Pierce opening her chicken and waffle restaurant in James N. Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce. I believe her second restaurant was in Laguna Beach.

Until a few years ago, I hadn’t seen chicken and waffles on a restaurant menu. When I read Mildred Pierce, in the 198os, I’d never before heard of chicken and waffles being served together. In food, art, literature, music, hair, and clothes, styles come, go, come again, go again. Never think what we’re doing is definitive.

Incidentally, Mildred Pierce, the book, is not a mystery, as the movie is and as are Cain’s classics Double Indemnity (1936) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934).