Kati Stauffer’s family moved in the 1990s from eastern Iowa to Lincoln to open a restaurant serving honest Midwestern cooking. Hot beef sandwiches. Pork tenderloin. Rhubarb pie. But they quickly realized they needed to offer two seemingly unrelated items as a combo.
“Someone gets in the mood for it and they come in for it,” she said. “They say, ‘I just had to have chili and cinnamon rolls today — please tell me you still have rolls left!’” The pairing is still a fixture on the Stauffer’s Café menu, but it’s much more than just a diner thing — you’ll find it in school cafeterias, at high-end Omaha restaurants and at Husker tailgates. The unofficial season tracks almost perfectly with the non-daylight saving time months — from the first heavy coat for a football game to when the last of the blackened snow is melting in the Walmart parking lot.
The first printed reference to chili and cinnamon rolls is from Indiana in 1905. The first school menu pairing chili and cinnamon rolls was in California in 1953. But these were likely random occurrences, says food historian Darcy Maulsby. “There’s no definitive answer to who was the first person or organization to serve the chili and cinnamon rolls combo,” she said. She suspects enterprising mid-century school cafeteria cooks deserve the credit.
