The KFC cookbook: a Colonel of truth?

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The KFC cookbook: a Colonel of truth?

On Monday, KFC will release what its spokeswoman calls a “long-lost” autobiography and cookbook, allegedly authored by the so-called Colonel Harland Sanders some 40 years ago and sequestered since then in the “vault” of some “forgotten-about storage facility”. The Sanders story remains the basis of the KFC creation myth, and the company has never shrunk from using his kindly, goateed image as a kind of avuncular mask.

I’ve seen a preview of the book and the recipes are deeply unappetising, using lots of canola oil and margarine. There are deep-fried parsnips, a peach cobbler (“If you use frozen thawed peaches be sure to drain them well in a colander”) and “coffee the way we used to make it on the farm”. This last calls for a whole egg, “shell and all”, to be crushed into the coffee grounds. Perhaps it’s sublime.

What’s most striking about the recipes, of course, is how little they resemble anything the chain produces today. (Like BP, KFC now exists only in initials.) There isn’t a Zinger® salad or a Fully Loaded™ in sight. But that isn’t surprising. According to Ron Douglas, who wrote a book exposing secret recipes and who claimed to have cracked the “11″, Sanders was furious with the “sons of bitches” to whom he sold the business. They “prostituted every goddamn thing I had,” he said. “I had the greatest gravy in the world and … they dragged it out and extended it and watered it down that I’m so goddamn mad!”

In addition to the 11 herbs and spices in the “secret” recipe and the barbecue sauce it claims Sanders created, during the mid-90s KFC served rotisserie chicken supposedly based on a “lost” Sanders recipe. Odd, then, that two-thirds of young Americans don’t even realise he was a real person.

Without wishing to launch WoM’s equivalent of the Hitler diaries, it seems conceivable that the volume is genuine. The style (he always calls it “cookin’”, for example) may be a little homespun, the southern wisdom just a mite hackneyed, and there may be some strange mindblanks. (“I’m 19 years older than my first child, Margaret, so that must mean I was about 18 years old when I was married” – you’d have thought that someone who built an empire the size of KFC might remember a detail like that.) But all these are in keeping with a man deeply attuned to the importance of self-branding.

By the time Sanders died in 1980, aged 90, his business had over 600 branches in three countries; it now has 15,000 in 105. Today part of Yum! Brands, which owns 38,000 restaurants around the world, KFC sells more than one billion meals a year. It’s hard to parse Sanders’ identity amid this: he seems to have enjoyed creating a persona for himself, painting his face on the side of his car before he was famous, and the company – let’s say – tends to emphasise the positives of his biography.

Colonel Sanders cooking fried chicken.

Sanders actually grew up in Indiana. He began working when he was 10, so the story goes, to feed his family. He spent time on the railways and held jobs as an insurance salesman and a streetcar conductor. He once shot a man, and when he was a lawyer he supposedly assaulted his own client in court. The “Colonel” business was an honorific bestowed on him by the state of Kentucky: it has nothing to do with any military career, and Sanders only adopted his trademark Southern garb after receiving it. (Churchill, whose war record is a little more distinguished than Sanders’, was also a Kentucky colonel, but the old lion chose not to mark the distinction by donning a string bow tie.)

Sanders had finally wound up in Kentucky, running a service station, by the time he was 40. This folded in the mid-1950s, making the then-65-year-old perilously close to bankruptcy. He started franchising his fried chicken recipe to nearby diners, taking a commission on each meal they sold, and in 1964 he sold the new business for $2m (at least $15m in today’s money). He spent the rest of his life tirelessly travelling round the world visiting his restaurants and giving money to charities and churches. (Don’t miss this clip of him on an evangelical chat show in 1979.)

KFC was in the news for two other reasons this week. Greenpeace staged a stunt drawing attention to the chain’s alleged involvement in the destruction of the Indonesian rainforest. (Fast food, after all, is rarely good for the environment.) And the ASA announced that a 2005 KFC advert, featuring call centre workers singing with their mouths full, had attracted more complaints than any other commercial in British TV history. I confess I found that campaign quite funny, and rather more original than this strange piece of self-mythologising from a bogus soldier.

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