In those days, fried chicken took a long time to prepare. My new method made it both practical and palatable. My combination service station and restaurant was on the inside of a curve. He had a little lunch counter set out with sandwiches. That way he could draw his air from my tank. I just gave it to him for nothing and he sure appreciated it. He was a good neighbor.
We got along fine, although I was getting most of the gas and food business. The big truck lines started coming south about that time, hauling tires south and hauling cotton back north.
Because my food was good and because truck drivers tell one another about that, it was a good source of revenue for us in Corbin. Of course, they bought gas, too. McVay, decided to go out of business.
He proposed to re-lease his station to me. I was glad to get it so I went across to his side of the road. I took my gasoline business with me, too, although I kept my old place to boot for quite a few years after that. Pretty soon I built three homemade family-style tables in the new place. I painted them green and I took my big dining room table across and put it in my new restaurant. What with the little lunch counter that was already there, I really thought I was in the restaurant business.
I spell all those words with capital letters. At first I fried my chicken in an iron skillet the way Mama had always fried it. She had used lard. My wife had used Crisco. I used a popular vegetable shortening at the time. I put my cut-up chicken in a pan and pressed flour into it with my fingers.
It sticks on better that way. When the chicken was nearly done I remember Mama used to turn it several times. The steam that built up had an effect of tenderizing the meat without drying it out too much. When my business got heavier I had to have something bigger than a skillet so I got myself an old-fashioned, oblong Dutch oven, about 18 or 20 inches long and about six or seven inches deep. It had a heavy lid. Before it got to bubbling up, I would slap the lid on, shove it to the back of the stove and put an iron on top of that to try to keep pressure in it.
I did it that way for several years. But even that way I used to cook chicken had the effect of pushing the spices and juices right into the chicken all the way down to the bone. I was only using a little of it in the flour. Then one day I heard they were having a demonstration of a new-fangled thing called a pressure cooker up at the hardware store.
They knew I was always serving fresh vegetables in small quantities. I took my green beans along, my bacon and the salt and pepper I was going to use on those beans.
They fooled me. They got the same taste in three and a half minutes. That convinced me. I bought eight of those cookers. After that, I could cook small quantities of vegetables and put fresh vegetables that were never tired and old on the table at all times.
Next I got to thinking about frying chicken with one of those things. Here I was frying chicken and trying to keep pressure on it in my Dutch oven. So I equipped it with a safety valve. After that, all I had to do was determine how much fat to use, what temperature to use, and how long to fry it under pressure. After trying it out a few times, I made up my mind about the correct pressure and the right amount of time. Within a year a competing company came out with a six-quart pressure cooker.
I grabbed that, too. In another year or so, an eight-quart pressure cooker came out and I bought some of those. In the meantime, I had developed my own special seasonings. I was selling an awful lot of chicken and I was building a wide reputation for it.
I had started out with a couple of seasonings, including pepper and salt. By trial and error, I inally arrived at what I felt was the perfect blend to supplement the fragrance of my chicken.
I got up to about ten different kinds of seasonings. But no matter how much chicken I sold, I still coated it by hand with my seasoned flour. I was afraid to put in another seasoning.
I had one in mind I thought would be good with the rest of my seasonings but there was nobody to try it out on except my customers. They were to be eaten on a boat trip up to Lake Cumberland. My assignment was just to fry the chickens for that many dinners and deliver them in big cases.
I had an inspiration. The cooker I use existed. All I did was adapt it. I still ran a small country restaurant, but I was growing. My wife Josephine helped me at the start but she faded out of the restaurant scene when I made enough money to hire help. Two years after I went into the business I bought a restaurant in Berea, Kentucky, 65 miles north of Corbin. I kept the old place, too. In fact, it was always my stand-by. I went to Berea to run the new restaurant while my son-in-law watched over the Corbin place.
My daughter helped him look after it, too. I had varied my menu a little but not much. Beside fried chicken I was giving my customers country ham and skillet-broiled steak. I always made sure I served good country ham and the best steaks I could buy. By boiling or baking a country ham you get so much shrinkage. The only way to get your money back is to fry it. You get your red-eye gravy that way, too.
There are no two ways about that. The waitress would tell you what we had on hand that day. She gave you your choice of meat and you had all you wanted to eat, but you had no choice on vegetables. I felt being in that book gave me a moral obligation to make sure my food was right, and my meals always were right.
Nearly everybody enjoyed them. A lot of people told me my food was the best between Cincinnati and Atlanta. For breakfast I had two prices for ham and eggs, fruit, coffee and hot biscuits.
There was one price for packing-house ham and another price for country ham. Plus, country ham had a lot of waste in it, about 50 percent.
One day I got tired of having to explain all that standing behind my cash register so I made a sign about my country ham and eggs. I figured that would stop people from asking questions. I framed it and put in on the wall. Clippings about that sign were mailed to me from all over the United States.
They have a sign on the wall there that reads so and so. If I ever start a chain of country ham and egg restaurants those same words will be on the wall again. But first of all, you have to know how to select one.
They just take a little hunting. I knew how to select hams with the right flavor if they had the right smell. I even sent a Cadillac over to Smithfield, Virginia. It came back loaded with nearly 80 country hams. If you cut it thin, the way most people do, it will dry out when you cook it.
You want the fat to get hot to get all the grease out. I never got a piece of ham yet that was cut as thick as it ought to have been. I wanted anyone who ate ham and eggs in my restaurant to have some of the best part of the ham. Cutting ham steaks, a cook will probably cut about 12 or 14 slices out of the center of his ham. On one side of the knife it was good ham steak and on the other it was the hock end.
So I always cut all my ham up in pieces and serve four-ounce portions, making sure that each portion contains a piece of that good ham. The important thing is to make sure everybody has enough good country ham to eat.
Country ham is spicy and aromatic. I worked up such a reputation for the flavor of my country ham that one day a man came into my place with his wife. It tastes real good now. When he got back to Dayton, Ohio, he told some of the other executives there about his wife not liking my ham, yet saying she could taste it later on. They wanted to know where in the world you could get ham like that. The next Sunday those people drove miles each way to my place to eat country ham.
A really dedicated country ham eater will do a thing like that. And the pleasant taste you have in your mouth after eating it makes it worthwhile. They knead it too much. Not only that, I showed my franchisees how to make them. I thought biscuits and chicken gravy just had to go with chicken. At Cornell they had big walk-in ice boxes and all the modern kitchen trimmings. I had something new on my mind. As far as I know, I was about to put up the irst motel east of the Mississippi.
Until then, nobody in our part of the country had ever seen anything but a run of separate cabins to sleep in when they were on the road. It was my idea to put my sleeping rooms all under one roof in an L-shaped court. With that in mind, I drew a floor plan. I talked to people in my restaurant about it. The way I had it figured, I could get 17 rooms on that lot. Then I did what to me at the time was high financing. I found out how much the bricks would cost to build the new rooms I wanted.
I went to a bricklayer to see how much it would cost to have that brick laid. Then I put on a roof. My idea was to finish up one or two rooms. But as it turned out, I had the whole thing nearly finished before I knew it, so I hit up the oil company that was selling me my gasoline for more help. They were already giving me a penny a gallon and letting me pay for the property out of that and here I was putting those buildings on this mortgaged property. They agreed. At that point I was finished except tiling the showers and buying the furniture.
When I found one, I made him a proposition. I had a good product. My motor court was popular. And I had my restaurant to feed my lodgers. I made the bedrooms in the motel soundproof.
They were heavily insulated with rock wool and they were air-conditioned. In each room I put a two-station radio speaker. That radio was controlled from my office so I was in charge of both the volume and the time of night they were shut off. And each room had its own tiled bath and wall-to-wall carpeting.
Those rooms were beautiful and way ahead of their time. He carried pictures of those bedrooms in his book Lodging for a Night for two or three years. I also passed a rule. In Kentucky the name of the county is stamped on every license plate, and of course, when you run a motel your lodgers also have to give you any information you want about their car registration. That was one of the ways in which I kept my clientele high-class.
John Willy, publisher of Hotel Monthly magazine, had been urging hotels to get into the motel business. He wrote an article about my place for his magazine and took pictures of the interiors of my rooms, the tile bathrooms and the hard rock maple furniture. I must say the photos looked really attractive. Also, Willy wrote that having been in one of my rooms, he was amazed that within five or ten minutes a waitress came to his door with a tray of coffee, sugar and cream, on the house.
I might also be the first motel owner who ever put a complimentary bowl of fruit in a room. I charged five or six dollars a night for an average room. Some of my bigger rooms with two double beds might have brought me eight dollars. Friends from all over had a tendency to stop by.
In his story in Hotel Monthly magazine, John Willy told about having the coffee brought in and how much it pleased him. Then he told all about the meal he had in my dining room. He described my fried chicken and my country ham. He said my vegetables were delicious. He meant that to impress anybody, biscuits must be served piping hot. Nobody ever had to ask for more butter or more biscuits in my places.
It was a wonderful place to eat, no two ways about that. Later I did get around to serving Lobster Newburg, lobster tails and Cornish hens for banquets.
They made the prettiest looking plate you ever saw on a a popular tourist stop from banquet table. They were served whole and each person cut up his or her own. My advice is to keep your menu small but good. That way you can give more attention and care to what you do serve. Take my steak, for example. I served a steak that was out of this world.
I always aged my own meat. People rarely talk about how good a steak was. They talk about how thick it was. It was mostly the eye of the rib, but not like the eye you buy at a market. I cut each steak a full inch thick. That steak would be about three inches wide and about seven or eight inches long. It made a ounce steak and every bit of it was edible. There was no bone. There was just a little fat out on the point and along the edge.
It had just enough good, rich fat to go with the lean you were eating it with. So the fellow who had done so well with me decided he wanted to build me another motel in Asheville, North Carolina.
The Asheville place already had a restaurant. The building was already built, too. That house was on a acre farm.
Eating there was like eating in your own home. I equipped the bedrooms with hard rock maple furniture just like I had done in my Corbin place. We built 24 rooms there. Some of them were rooms with two beds, and I always used double beds in those. That way, if a family of four stopped in, instead of having a twin bedroom, I could put four people together: Dad, Mom and the kids. I never had to turn anyone away because of not having the right accommodations.
When we opened our Asheville place, we did mighty well. That was lucky for us because we opened it in July, and in November my Corbin place burned down — the dining room, the motel and everything, right to the ground. They called me in Asheville from Corbin and told me my motel was on fire.
The London Fire Department is coming. Knock out one of the rooms — the roof, wall, everything — but save the rest. I was back in Corbin as soon as I could drive the miles over those mountain roads. On my way up I thought about how I was going to rebuild. I even figured out a way to finance it.
I was far enough along with the land by then, and we had a good business and a good line of credit, so I knew I could get some money. With the Asheville Court paying off as quickly as it was, I figured I could rebuild the Corbin place as sleeping rooms and not build a dining room. In my mind I also made part of the new building two stories. That worried me. I knew I was up to my borrowing limit at the bank. Add this book to your favorite list ».
Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Jan 14, Andrew Allison rated it it was amazing Shelves: history. Incredible story. Absolute legend of a man. Enjoyed his coffee recipe this morning! May 17, Angela Duong rated it it was amazing. The Colonel lived his life with a very admirable mindset, never underestimating the rewards of hard work and always moving forward through hardships.
Even when he reached the age where many would have retired or worked a lot less, he teaches the idea that your life is what you make of it; you are only unable to keep working when you make yourself believe that. These days, too many people want to take shortcuts or always find an excuse for why they can't work hard - people are either "too young" The Colonel lived his life with a very admirable mindset, never underestimating the rewards of hard work and always moving forward through hardships.
These days, too many people want to take shortcuts or always find an excuse for why they can't work hard - people are either "too young" so nothing they do really matters or "too old" where it seems like it's too late to do anything.
Even if the Colonel's story may be exaggerated at some points, the lessons he aims to share and the inspiration that readers can take from it remain wholly true.
Dec 31, Shane Moore rated it liked it Shelves: non-fiction , male-author. I think the best aspect of a good autobiography is that it can capture the voice and personality of the author, and this one does that. The "Colonel" tells quite a story, with himself as the plucky country boy made good. While it has inconsistencies and gaps that indicate a bit of exaggeration and omission, I don't hold it against him.
He's charming even if a good deal of his persona is put on. Here's an example of his voice and what he says. After stating that he's begun to be profitable enough I think the best aspect of a good autobiography is that it can capture the voice and personality of the author, and this one does that.
When talking about how he'd sold the business and taken on an advisory role he wrote: Everybody works as a team and they think nothing of working 12 to 14 hours a day. I set that example. Kentucky Fried Chicken to make recipe-laden autobiography, written in but discovered last November, available for free download via Facebook. The original celebrity chef Photograph: Rex Features. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book.
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Return to Book Page. The autobiography provides "an authentic look into the life of one of the world's legendary entrepreneurs," said KFC, with "both the insightful life lessons and the delicious recipes remain[ing] relevant today Colonel Harland Sanders: The Autobiography of the Original Celebrity Chef was written by Harland Sanders in and discovered by accident more than 40 years later.
The autobiography provides "an authentic look into the life of one of the world's legendary entrepreneurs," said KFC, with "both the insightful life lessons and the delicious recipes remain[ing] relevant today. That man is me. The food I've liked, the work I've done and the way I think are all the same things.
It's not such a far-fetched idea. A lot of learned men think people really are the food they've eaten," writes Sanders in the introduction. In addition to detailing the Colonel's rise as a fried chicken icon, the book will also feature 33 "never-before-seen" recipes, including an omelette, upside-down peach cobbler, and potato pancakes. Get A Copy. More Details The franchise now known as KFC operates 15, stores in more than countries. Sanders died in News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism.
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