• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

After years of bouncing from job to job (farmhand, streetcar conductor, soldier, insurance salesman, steamboat ferry operator, railroad fireman, paralegal), Sanders came home to Corbin, Kentucky, and started the business that would make him both millionaire and celebrity. In the front room of a gas station, no less.

Here, in 1930, Sanders began serving weary travelers the southern dishes he’d learned to cook as a child. People loved his food—especially that fried chicken—and kept coming back for more. To accommodate his increasing number of fans, Sanders moved his tiny café into a motel across the street.

Among those early Sanders Café fans was fellow Kentuckian Duncan Hines, who recommended the place in his Adventures in Good Eating. That rave in the 1939 edition of the American motorist’s bible put Sanders’s little Corbin, Kentucky, restaurant on the map.

Yet barely a dozen years later Sanders was out of business. In the 1950s, the government hurled a new interstate right past Corbin. With customers dwindling, Sanders closed his café, auctioned off its equipment, and, after settling his accounts, was reduced to living on his meager monthly Social Security check.

Still believing in his fried chicken with its secret seasoning blend of eleven herbs and spices, Sanders took to the road in 1952. Crisscrossing the country, he called on restaurant owners and fried batches of chicken golden, crisp, and tender for them to taste. Dozens were impressed enough to cut a deal: Sanders would share his secret recipe and frying technique if they’d pay him a nickel for every order sold.

By 1964, there were more than 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. That same year Harland Sanders sold his stake in KFC for $2 million, but he remained its spokesman until he died in 1980 at the age of ninety. Of course he will live forever as its grinning “Kentucky Colonel” icon.

* * *

* * *

FRANK PERDUE (1920–2005)

A shy only child born the year his father began raising chickens on a small Maryland farm, beak-nosed, raspy-voiced Frank Perdue emerged in the 1970s as America’s unlikeliest TV pitchman. “It takes a tough man to raise a tender chicken,” he twanged, making Perdue the country’s first brand-name chicken. By the ’90s, he’d built a multi-billion-dollar business.

In the beginning, Perdue’s father raised chickens for eggs, not eating, but he switched to the lucrative broiler business in the 1940s, first wholesale, then retail some twenty years later.

As innovative as he was entrepreneurial, Frank Perdue added marigold petals to chicken feed to give his broilers the golden skin customers preferred. He singed off the wing hairs they hated. He cross-bred Cornish with White Plymouth Rocks to give his broilers plumper breasts. He packed his chickens in ice instead of freezing them. He worked eighteen to twenty hours a day, often sleeping at the office. Frank Perdue believed in his chickens and so did millions of Americans.

With Perdue staying on as chairman of the executive committee, look-alike son Jim took over Perdue Farms, Inc., in 1991. Before long, his “What? Me-obsessed-with-chicken?” commercials were all over the tube. And as amusing as his dad’s.

When Frank Perdue died in 2005 at the age of eighty-four, his Maryland-based company was employing almost 20,000 people and grossing $2.8 billion a year. Hardly chicken feed.

* * *

* * *

TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine

1856

Gail Borden patents his process for sweetened condensed milk, which he’d developed two years earlier. Although he did so in the North, his sweetened condensed milk had a greater impact in the Deep South, where fresh milk spoiled in a matter of hours.

1859

Cubans are imported to roll cigars in the factories springing up around Tampa, Florida, and their black bean soups and saffron-hued arroz con pollo quickly spice up the local cuisine.

1861

The opening shot of the Civil War is fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The war will free