Hardee’s Secret Menu: The Harold
Its Murky Origins
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. 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. However, Macomb is also home to one of Illinois’ public universities, WIU. 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. Some of the students noticed Harold’s eponymous custom breakfast and began ordering it for themselves.
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 those students from WIU returned to their hometowns and opened restaurants and began serving their own takes also. 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. Denny’s? I’m not sure there’s ever been a Denny’s in Macomb. 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.
Speaking of Telephone and garbled versions of the Harold’s origin story, I came across another writeup on blog site the Daily Kos while researching this story. According to this alternate history, the dish was invented by an employee of the Hardee’s located in WIU’s on-campus student union. This Harold had Down Syndrome, and per the story would “take a tray that the (biscuits) came in. Line the bottom with hashrounds. Topped with a (biscuit), scrambled eggs, and a ton of (sausage gravy) and cheese.” It’s a feel-good story and probably nice to remember that way. But most accounts put the origin at the West side Hardee’s on Jackson, the last Hardee’s standing in Macomb, which sadly closed in 2017.
(Incidentally, the picture attached to this tweet was the only photograph I could find online of an actual Harold from Hardee’s. Today, we right this wrong.)
A Delicious Digression
It also just makes sense for the Harold to be a farmer’s breakfast. 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. 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. 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. Supper, the final meal of the day, would be the lightest, as the day’s work had already been completed.
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. I’ve seen the dish I’m thinking of referenced online as “Amish chicken and noodles” or similar phrases. I didn’t know it had a name. 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. Essentially, it consisted of thick chewy homemade egg noodles served with shredded meat in gravy over a bed of mashed potatoes. Carbs and fat on carbs and fat, the ultimate comfort food, and a Midwestern farmer’s ideal vehicle for the day’s calories.
I hadn’t eaten this dish–let’s just call it chicken and noodles–in years. Decades, probably. 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. You don’t really need a recipe for this dish, which is good since this isn’t a recipe blog, and yet. And YET. 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 may not. I forbid it. The glory of this dish is in the toothsomeness of thick, rustic, chewy homemade noodles. And so I present to you my mom’s response when I asked her for the recipe for homemade noodles.
To make enough noodles to serve with 1 chicken, I doubled that recipe, using 2 cups of sifted flour, 2 eggs, etc.
If you wanted to get fancy with this, you could roast a chicken and use that. I’m sure that plenty of people have just thrown a raw chicken into some water to get started. But what I did was to add a rotisserie chicken, purchased this day from my local grocery store, to 2 quarts of store-bought chicken stock, along with an unpeeled onion, cut in half. I simmered those things together very gently for the 2 hours or so that the noodles were drying out, then pulled out the onion and the chicken and seasoned the stock with salt and pepper. I removed and shredded the meat from the chicken, then returned it to the stock and brought it back to a boil. About 10 minutes before I was ready to serve, I threw the noodles, along with the flour I’d used to keep them from sticking to the table or to themselves, into the boiling stock. The stock cooks the noodles, the flour thickens the stock, and you end up with chicken and noodles.
To plate it, start with some mashed potatoes. Season the mashed potatoes with some butter, salt, and pepper–we’re not savages.
Then ladle some chicken and noodles over the top. Season the chicken and noodles as well–salt and pepper again, as that is the sum total of seasonings you will find on the Midwestern table.
Your puny non-Midwestern minds cannot conceive of the glories of this dish. It may look like varieties of beige glop–and it is, to be sure. The chicken has been simmered into texturelessness; the potatoes are well and truly mashed, mixed with cream and butter; gravy is gravy and noodles are noodles to be sure. But there are variations to the beige glop, strata to be explored; the silken strands of chicken; the resilient chew of the noodles; the firm base of potatoes; and the deluge of oniony chicken gravy in which all is awash.
Yes, part of me wants to say, this needs something crunchy or acidic, to break up the textural monotony or to cut the fattiness. But the Jim who grew up in west central Illinois knows that it’s perfect as it is. You could add a vegetable–as it happens, I served this with a green salad. If you were eating it on a Midwestern farm, likely as not your vegetable component would be another carb, sweet corn.
Chicken and noodles
Ingredients
- 2 cups all-purpose flour sifted
- 2 eggs beaten
- 4 tbsp milk
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 rotisserie chicken can be purchased from grocery store
- 2 quarts chicken stock
- 1 large onion unpeeled
- 3 lbs russet potatoes
- 1/2 cup milk
- 4 tbsp butter
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Mound sifted flour and create well in middle. Add eggs, milk, and salt to the well. Combine into a stiff dough
- Roll dough thin on liberally floured surface and cut into thin strips. Cut strips into 1-2" lengths
- Allow noodles to dry on floured surface for 2 hours
- While noodles are drying, add whole rotisserie chicken with stock to a stockpot on the stove. Cut onion in half and add this as well. Simmer gently for the 2 hours the noodles are drying
- While the stock is simmering, boil 3 lbs of potatoes in their skins until fully cooked. Drain, peel off skins, and smash with potato masher, adding 1/2 cup milk and 4 tbsp of butter, or however much it takes to get the potatoes to the consistency you like. Do *not* use instant. Keep warm.
- Remove rotisserie chicken and onion pieces from stock. discard onion pieces. strip and discard skin from chicken. remove meat from chicken carcass, cut into bite-sized pieces and add back to stock
- 10 minutes before serving, add dried noodles and the flour from the surface they were drying on to the chicken and stock mixture. Bring to a boil and cook the noodles. The stock will thicken to a gravy while the noodles cook
- To serve, add mashed potatoes to a wide plate or bowl. Season with butter, salt, and pepper. Add noodles and gravy on top of the mashed potatoes and season again.
- Eat, then go work in a field for 12 hours or so.
So Secret Nobody Knows It
Just how secret a secret menu item is the Harold? As we’ve noted before, Hardee’s locations never seem to last long in the Chicagoland area, but within the past couple of years a truck stop went up on I-94 in South Holland, just an 18 minute drive from me, so I stopped by one morning to ask for one.
The Hardee’s has a drive-thru–one of those counter-intuitive types, a clockwise loop rather than counter-clockwise with the speaker away from the building. I stopped in anyway, to ask in person if they knew how to make a Harold.
They did not.
However, they were friendly and helpful and darn near delighted to learn what went into one and do their best for me.
They weren’t sure what order to put thing in. Truth be told, neither was I. Despite having grown up in west central Illinois, the Land of the Harold, I had never myself eaten one. They did their best though, and you can see that all the requisite bits are here–the egg, the hash rounds, the gravy. Presumably the shape underneath the gravy is one of Hardee’s tremendous biscuits.
Of course I cannot conceive of eating biscuits and gravy without a drizzle of hot sauce. Once again, the Hardee’s staff was only too happy to oblige.
I cannot overemphasize how helpful and friendly the staff at this Hardee’s was, at least on this particular morning that I went. The small dining room had 2 or 3 tables open, the rest closed to conform with social distancing guidelines, and a nice table in the window was open so I ate right there in the restaurant.
It was quite good–Hardee’s biscuits are the among the cream of the crop when it comes to fast food biscuits, and the hash rounds are also good–simple, well-fried, crisp and potatoey. The scrambled eggs are fine, and Hardee’s sausage gravy is pretty light on the sausage but otherwise OK. The Hardee’s branded hot sauce packets are a fairly standard Louisiana style hot sauce that is right up my alley for breakfast fare. It’s good. But is it a Harold? And more, is it a sandwich?
Can You Sandwich It?
When I announced we’d be tackling this dish at the beginning of March, some of my friends on Twitter got a bit aflutter about the possibilities. Jonathan Surratt aka @beerinator, long-time friend and prolific sandwich-maker with his own newly-minted sandwich blog Bounded By Buns, went so far as to make his own, terrific-looking version of The Harold, setting a pretty high bar for me. THANKS, Jonathan!
How can I improve upon perfection? *cracks knuckles*
From time to time, I make myself a batch of breakfast sausage, split it up into 1lb packages, and freeze it. I use the recipe from Ruhlman & Polcyn’s Charcuterie, as I’ve never found a reason to improve on that version. I mean, apart from cutting back on the ginger just a touch and adding a bit of dried rubbed sage to supplement the fresh sage and sometimes running part of the batch through the coarse grinding die to give it a more rustic texture. Apart from that, this chub of sausage might as well have come from Michael Ruhlman’s freezer rather than my own.
To make sausage gravy–I was going to say that it isn’t really a recipe, but you’ll still need one if you don’t already know how. Here’s the basic process. Simply brown a pound of sausage in a pan–I like to use my cast iron skillet for this. Brown it well, so that the bits start to get some texture and stick to the pan a bit, chopping it up with the edge of your spatula as you go. Then pull as much of the sausage out as you can, eyeball the grease left in the pan and add enough butter to make it come to about 4 tablespoons. Next add 4 tablespoons of flour and stir for a minute or two, mixing it in thoroughly and cooking away the floury flavor without browning the roux the way you would for Cajun cooking. Slowly stir in 2 cups of milk, preheated so that it doesn’t take as long to come up to the pan’s temperature, about an ounce or two at a time, making sure each addition gets thoroughly absorbed by the flour before continuing. Season with salt and pepper and add the sausage bits back in. Bam. Sausage gravy.
Sausage gravy
Ingredients
- 1 lb pork sausage store-bought or preferably homemade
- butter enough to make 4tbsp total with the rendered fat of the sausage
- 4 tbsp flour
- 2 cups milk preheated
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Brown the sausage in a large cast-iron pan, chopping into small pieces as you go. Try to cook it long enough to get some actual browning on the meat
- Remove sausage from pan, leaving fat and any stuck-on crispy bits behind. Add and melt enough butter to make 4tbsp of fat
- Add 4tbsp of flour. Stir until butter and flour are mixed thoroughly and allow to cook for 1 minute
- Slowly stir in preheated milk, an ounce or two at a time, stirring constantly and making sure each addition is fully absorbed before continuing
- Once all milk has been added, return the sausage to the pan and stir into the gravy.
- Cook until the gravy thickens to your desired texture. Serve over biscuits with hot sauce
Biscuits come together very quickly, and the main things to remember when making them are to use the right flour and to keep things very cold until they go into the oven. Here’s what I do: freeze a stick of butter, then grate a little more than half of it–maybe 5 tablespoons?–into 2 cups of White Lily self-rising flour. Add something like 3/4 of a cup of buttermilk–maybe a few drops more, but certainly not a whole cup–and mix just until it all starts to stick together. Scatter a little flour onto your table and rub some on your fingers, then dump your biscuit dough onto your floured surface and pat it with your floured hands into a rectangle maybe 5″ by 10″, 3/4″ thick. Fold it over once, pat it out again. Fold and pat one, maybe two more times, then stop. Don’t overwork the dough. Cut out your biscuits–you can cut them round like I did if you want to be fancy but you’re going to end up with biscuits made from scrap dough and they won’t be as good–and bake at 475°F for 10 or 12 minutes–maybe less, my oven is a little screwy. I take the remainder of the frozen stick of butter, melt it in the microwave, and brush it over the top of the biscuits halfway through baking and again at the end. My biscuits are… pretty good. Pretty damn good.
Buttermilk biscuits
Ingredients
- 2 cups White Lily self-rising flour
- 1 stick butter frozen
- 3/4 cup buttermilk perhaps a few drops more–ice cold
Instructions
- grate slightly more than half–maybe 5 tablespoons–of the frozen butter into the flour and stir until all butter is coated in flour
- mix in buttermilk until dough is just coming together
- on lightly floured surface, pat dough with floured fingers into a roughly 5"x10" rectangle
- fold dough over onto itself and pat out again. Repeat once, twice at most
- Cut out biscuits. Use 2 1/2" circular cookie cutter and form scraps together into mutant biscuits or just cut into squares with bench scraper
- melt remainder of the stick of butter in a bowl in the microwave
- Bake on cookie sheet at 475°F for 10-12 minutes. Brush tops with melted butter once halfway through baking and again at the end.
- Serve with sausage gravy and hot sauce
Instead of the tater-tot like snackiness of the hash rounds, for a sandwich I looked to a clone recipe for a McDonald’s style hash brown patty. This one turned out pretty good, but there are definite caveats. First, the patties should be made and frozen well ahead of time. Second, I julienned the potatoes with my mandoline after cooking them instead of shredding as the recipe called for. This made the thickness of potato pieces more uniform and closer to what one generally sees in either a tater tot or a fast food hash brown patty. Third, the oil needs to be good and hot before you put the patties into it. Mine was somewhere between 375° and 400° F. And fourth, use plenty of that oil. Make it a good inch deep as specified. The oil needs to cook the outside of the patty and set its shape before the inside thaws and the weak corn-starch and potato-flour glue holding the thing together fails. Pan-frying ain’t gonna cut it.
My eldest son Damian has, for the past 7 months or so, been sharing a house in Urbana with a group of ecologically-minded, scrap-composting, organic-gardening, chicken-keeping folks, and recently due to a surplus we were the lucky beneficiaries of some urban farm eggs as a result. My egg scrambling technique is not fancy. I just melt some butter in a non-stick pan, tip in my beaten eggs, season them with salt and pepper, and then chase them around the pan with a silicon spatula keeping them from sticking until they’re done. Sometimes I like them to be a little more firmly set, sometimes I like them to be a bit moister.
Starting with the bottom half of my biscuit
First I added the hash brown patty
Then I added some sausage gravy
Then the scrambled eggs
Then, finally, the top half of the biscuit
Is it a sandwich? It certainly appears to fit the criteria–bottom bread, fillings, top bread. Yet I did not even attempt to eat this out of hand. Every bite from first to last was fork-aided I’m afraid.
It was really incredibly good though, sandwich or no. My sausage is still a bit ginger-heavy, but its aromatic qualities make the sausage gravy far more interesting than many a more standard version. The hash brown patty was perfectly crisp, the slight onion powder and white pepper seasoning a welcome addition. My biscuits were dead on, and these eggs were as good as or better than any eggs I’ve ever had. This Harold would go into the Harold Hall of Fame, if such a thing existed for fast food secret menu items and accepted home-made versions as entries for Best Harold Ever. Jonathan, I’m sure yours was great too.
Highway to Harold
With no idea how the thing is actually put together at a Hardee’s in the know, and with edification within arm’s reach give or take 300 miles, it was time for a trip back home. As mentioned, the Hardee’s in Macomb where the Harold originated is no longer in existence, but the Hardee’s locations in Quincy are still going strong. (2 out of 3 of them, anyway. One closed a while back and its former building now hosts the unfortunately named Chompz Grill. They have massive and delicious tenderloins I’m told, so I’m sure I’ll visit some day.) The Hardee’s at 30th and Broadway is open for drive-thru orders only, and at peak times the line of cars snakes through its parking lot and into that of Kelly’s Tavern next door.
The Harold from this Hardee’s came in packaging that looks suspiciously like the photo from the tweet referenced earlier in this post, the only photo I could find of a Hardee’s Harold online. This, I thought, was a good sign.
Inside, the Harold I was served looked very much like the photo, but easier to parse in person.
That’s two Hardee’s biscuits, or maybe (probably) one split in half, a layer of scrambled egg, plenty of gravy–key takeaway on the Harold, or really any biscuits & gravy situation, do not scrimp on the gravy–and the equivalent of likely a small order of hash rounds.
It just… it looks like a lot of food. It is a lot of food. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it, even with the help of some Valentina hot sauce my sister Ali keeps in Mom’s fridge.
And yet, once you start, you can’t stop.
I tend to avoid eaten-food images on the site as I personally find them unappetizing–no, I don’t want to see that picture of your delicious hamburger with one bite taken out of it, thank you very much! But in this case I felt like finishing was an accomplishment and should be duly recorded.
World, I have now eaten a Harold.
Its Upscale Legacy
As mentioned, The Harold has followed WIU graduates to other parts of the state, and been featured on widespread menus as a result. In west central Illinois though, the Harold’s home ground, it would be strange to find a non-chain diner, cafe, or brunch spot that didn’t serve some take on it. While in Quincy, we tried the version at Thyme Square, one of my mom’s local favorites.
The Thyme Square dining area was set up for social distancing, and we were able to reserve a table ahead of time. I was a little perturbed to see people milling around outside the restaurant en masse waiting for tables, and even entering the restaurant to go to a table without putting on a mask per the guidelines. But the restaurant workers themselves were very professional and doing their best to accommodate their guests safely. People can just be pretty thoughtless, I guess.
Roughly half the folks at our table of 8–current guidelines, 10 people max–ordered Thyme Square’s version of the Harold, the “Thyme Squarold,” along with me. This one was the most photogenic of the lot.
The Thyme Squarold, per their menu, consists of a “house-made cheddar biscuit topped with scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, aged cheddar & warm sausage gravy.” As my mom points out, everything is made in-house, from the sausage to the biscuit. Even the hot sauce I requested was house-made, delivered in a stainless steel ramekin.
How about the cheddar, was that house-made? Auguries are uncertain, ask again later. In any case, the gravy was terrific, warmly herb-forward, featuring less of the house sausage than I personally would use but far more than at Hardee’s. The potatoes, vastly different from the style used in the original, were also a standout, crisply browned on the outside with soft, pillowy interiors. The eggs were good as well, cooked very much like the ones I made earlier in this post.
Unfortunately on the day we visited the biscuit was the weak link. Surely this was a fluke, as baked goods are one of the things Thyme Square is known for. My sister, who eats breakfast with our mother at Thyme Square frequently, says they are normally much better. But these biscuits were hard and dry, not inedible but needing some help. If the portion of gravy had been more generous, that might have helped balance the dry biscuits but the dish came with less gravy than I’d have used on a perfect biscuit. This Thyme Squarold looked good and parts of it even tasted great. I’ll have to try it again on another day and see if it’s any better.
Its Unsatisfactory Conclusion
This has been a pretty high-calorie pursuit of something that rightly can’t even be called a sandwich, and I beg your indulgence. I’ve wanted to feature the Harold on the site for a while, ever since I talked about it with my family at one holiday or another back in 2019, probably, when we were still all able to get together as a family. As COVID times hopefully draw to a close, and the vaccines help us achieve herd immunity–or at the very least some level of normalcy–we hope to be seeing each other more often, and I hope the same for you and your families. Anyway, if Chipped Beef on Toast is a sandwich, then Biscuits & Gravy is surely one as well. And if Biscuits & Gravy is a sandwich, well, I don’t see what’s so wrong with adding eggs and hash browns to it.
Any Harold fans out there have any stories of the Harold in Macomb or its namesake? Anybody have any local variants they’d like to tell us about? We’d love to hear it! Please leave a comment below. Thanks!
I like sandwiches.
I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great
I grew up in Macomb IL. From around 1978 to 2011. As long as I lived there, there was never a Dennys. There was a restaurant on the west side of town that had gone through many iterations of places that we Denny’s-esque, however never a Dennys. As a new reader, have you ever done the horseshow? That sandwich is AMAZING at a place called Jackson Street Pub also located in Macomb, on west Jackson street. Thanks for a fun read!
Hi! Thanks for confirming; I didn’t think there’d ever been a Denny’s there but I am often wrong! As for the horseshoe, I grew up on them! Never been to Jackson Street Pub but maybe some day. Too many places to try! Thanks for the comment! and here’s a piece I did on the horseshoe a few years ago: https://www.sandwichtribunal.com/2016/09/springfields-horseshoe/
Jim, I also grew up in Macomb and worked at Hardee’s in the late 80s when I was in high school. I made several hundred Harold’s and can tell you how they were made back then. Small order of hash rounds in the bottom of the biscuit and gravy boat. Next comes the biscuit and gravy with scrambled eggs going on top. Cheese was never an original ingredient, but you could pay extra and get slices on American cheese on it if you wanted. Back then, Hardee’s only had sliced cheese. You can get pretty close to it by ordering the sausage breakfast platter which has, hash rounds, biscuit, gravy, a folded egg and a piece of sausage. Just assemble and you have what is basically a Harold.
Delightful story! I left Macomb before the ‘80s, but worked at the then-only Hardees in the late ‘70s, when the big secret menu item was the Sam special. I was disappointed when I visited years later to learn that this storied treat — a dressed up cheese sandwich on a bun — developed by a vegetarian co-worker and ordered regularly by staff and other cognoscenti, had been long forgotten.
I loved this story! I lived for a time in upstate New York outside Rochester. They have a trash plate for lunch and supper. The Harold is a great way to begin a day of feasting! My heart pounds for thee, Harold!
This is one of the few dishes in Macomb that tasted as good sober as it did when you were completely run out from partying. When I was first introduced to it in the early 80’s (probably 1981) it cost a flat 2 bucks, tax included. After having one, I always made sure I had at least two bucks for Harold at the end of the night (more likely early morning). Harold is just an open faced sandwich the same as others, but Hardees had the perfect ingredients to make it delicious. When it began, the split biscuit was on the bottom, the eggs were next, gravy over that, and topped with the hashed browns. It looks like so much food. Until you start eating it. Then it’s just the right amount,, sober or wasted. Amazing how easily this comfprttreat went down. I ate these my whole senior yaar at WIU (81-82) and again in graduate school and as an employee a few years later. Until I met Harold, I thought three Hardess in Macomb was excessive (with only one McDonalds and no Burger King at the time). So many culinary treats I miss from Macomb, so few still exist. I hear you can still get a good pork tenderloin at Jackson Street Pub. It’s not Roe Boat, however. Horseshoes at the Tack Room in the Lamoine Hotel were hard to beat. If they don’t have waffle cut fries, they don’t have a horseshoe for my money. The place many people think of as a Denny’s was actually called Sambos (in spectacularly racist fashion). It went out of business fairly quickly if I remember correctly.