By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 228). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
INGREDIENTS:
The Crackers:
1 cup self-rising flour
2 cups Graham or wheat flour
1 cup each: margarine and packed, brown sugar
½ cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon vinegar
About ¼ cup milk, or as needed
INSTRUCTIONS:
Combine flours and set aside. Cream margarine, adding sugar a little at a time and beating until light and fluffy. Beat in honey, vanilla and vinegar – work in flour, alternately with enough of the milk that you have a smooth dough that can be shaped into a ball like piecrust.
Chill 1 hour. Roll out on lightly floured surface to 1/8-inch thick. Cut into 2.5 x 2.5” squares and place close together on lightly greased baking sheets. Prick tops of each with tines of a fork in several places.
Bake at 350°F for 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned around the edges. Remove at once to cool on waxed-paper-covered-surface. Flatten each cracker just slightly with back-side of a pancake turner while still warm. Makes about 1 dozen crackers. Prepare the chocolate coating (below.)
CHOCOLATE COATING FOR GRAHAM CRACKERS
INGREDIENTS:
The Coating:
6 tablespoons melted paraffin
12-ounce package semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 ounce solid, unsweetened, baking chocolate
1 teaspoon vanilla
dash of salt
INSTRUCTIONS:
Keep mixture hot, stirring occasionally to make it smooth, while you pierce the graham crackers with the tip of a sharp knife and dip each to coat them in the hot chocolate mixture. Let excess chocolate drip back into pan.
Place on waxed paper to “set” the chocolate. Paper can be peeled away without taking any of the coating with it, once graham crackers have cooled. If you lift the crackers from the paper, instead of the paper from the crackers, some of the coating may stick to the paper. Makes enough coating for 1 dozen squares of graham crackers. Store at room temperature in covered container.
By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 100). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
INGREDIENTS:
3-lb chicken, cut-up fryer pieces (rinsed and drained)
Flour (enough to coat each piece)
Equal amounts of oil and Crisco (sufficient to fill large skillet 1-inch deep)
Season salt (to taste)
[3 to 4 cups] Chicken broth (homemade or canned, sufficient to baste each piece about 5 to 6 times)
INSTRUCTIONS:
Run the cut-up fryer pieces of 3 pounds of chicken under cold water. Drain off excess water. Coat each piece in flour. Heat enough oil and Crisco in equal parts that, when melted, it fills a large heavy skillet to about 1-inch deep.
Brown the floured pieces a few at a time, with the skin-side down first, for about 4 or 5 minutes or until golden brown, sprinkling liberally with season salt. Brown both sides of the chicken pieces and arrange them in a shallow roasting pan with the skin-side up, in a single layer. Do not heap the pieces in the pan.
Drizzle each piece with about 2 tablespoons chicken broth – homemade or canned. Bake uncovered at 375°F for about 30 minutes, basting the pieces every 5 minutes with a spoonful of drippings. Do not turn the pieces while baking them. When the meat of the chicken appears fork-tender and the coating is golden and crispy, it’s ready to serve to 4-6 people.
Marketing can manipulate the masses. In fact, Mom’s masterful marketing talents influenced a whole movement of copycat cooks! She always referred to her business as a “family enterprise”. However, almost every aspect of it was really Mom’s creation, right from the start.
The research, the recipes, the tests – everything, from the development, and perfecting, of her recipe imitations to writing, producing, and self-publishing her books and newsletters to marketing all of it – that was Mom! Dad managed the business end – going through all the mail, filling and shipping orders, ordering office supplies, keeping all the company records, etc.
My siblings and I often helped both, Mom and Dad, with many different tasks, after school and on the weekends… even into our adulthoods. I’ve openly admitted that marketing is a challenge for me, to say the least. Mom was a natural at it.
Mom really enjoyed her busy promotional schedule of radio talk shows before and after each of her cookbooks (and newsletter issues) “premiered”. To Mom, her radio “visits”, across the country and internationally, were like sitting at the kitchen table, having coffee and chatting with friends!
Like any proud mom, she loved to talk about her babies (the recipes, newsletters and cookbooks – plus, us kids, too)! Mom briefly ventured into television talk shows for some of her cookbook promotions – as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs – most renowned were the 2 times she was on the Phil Donahue Show (in 1981 and 1993). The 41st anniversary of the first appearance is on Thursday!
However, Mom always felt more at home on the radio. I guess that’s because she usually was at home, doing most of her radio roundtables by phone. Although, many times, when my parents would travel (especially with their “Good Sam” friends), Mom would find a way to fit in an “in-studio” radio visit or short-cut cooking lecture or restaurant review whenever she could.
Mom was a natural at marketing her talents and her products. I may have inherited her loves for writing, art and creativity in general; but I know I’m lacking in her self-confidence and many marketing talents! These days, I get anxiety just from the idea of selling anything. I tried selling a couple of times (for Amway and for Home Interiors & Gifts) but I was not good at all.
So many times, in interviews and “fan” mail, Mom would be asked how she did it and how can someone else do what she did? Instead of composing a “How To…” guide for writing, publishing, and marketing a newsletter (or books), Mom wrote “our family story” in her book, My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989); in hopes that it might inspire others. Below is a patch-work quilt of such excerpts from that book.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
Excerpts by Gloria Pitzer…
As seen in…
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989)
THE EXPERIENCES WE’VE encountered in building this family enterprise of ours, this cottage industry… has occurred while distributing recipe secrets through radio broadcasting and newspaper exposure and our own publishing efforts. If someone can benefit from our experiences, all the better. Mostly, though, this is just a story of our family, our five children…and how we made a dent in the hard shell of the publishing industry. (p. 2)
AT LEAST ONCE a week…I am asked how I got into this business, how it all started and how somebody else can write their own book [or newsletter] and get it published. If there were a formula for our kind of success…I would be happy to share the information…
The experiences that comprise the success and longevity of our Secret RecipesTM include some very wonderful people who have gone out of their way to make it easy for us to present our work to the public…
Over the years, it has been, not a job, but a joy to continue investigating the secrets of the food industry, combining this information and recipes with the logic of the heart, the food for thought as well as food for the table. It continues to arouse interest and delight in, both, our readers and radio listeners all over the country, as well as the world! (pp. 14-15)
IF SOMEONE WERE to copy our so-called “success”, I could give them no blueprint for that condition. Each one of the little steps that we had to take to develop the kitchen table activity into a professional business operation, are like the grains of sand that the oyster requires to form a pearl. (p. 25)
Mom had developed an innovative way to market her talents to her initial “target audience”, based on inspiration from an interview she had heard, of an award-winning car salesman in Detroit. Mom printed hundreds of business cards on her mimeograph, and I remember her taking me and my sisters to the mall and big department stores like Sears, J.C. Penny’s, and J.L. Hudson’s to disperse them.
It was an all-day event of shopping combined with marketing, as each of us girls would get a handful of her business cards to stick in the pockets of various clothes and purse displays while we browsed and shopped. After a few hours, we’d take a lunch break in one of the department stores’ dining rooms, where Mom found many great dishes to mimic at home. It was a lot of fun!
‘BELIEVE ME, IT’S not easy, putting out your own [book or] newsletter; and it is foolish for anyone to believe that there is a blueprint…to follow that will promise instant success.’ – Gloria Pitzer, My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, p. 48)
July is celebrating National Independent Retailer Month, which offers us the unique chance to better know our local small business owners and show that we appreciate them. Like Mom and Dad, many small, local, business owners and operators usually work very long hours, dedicating extra time to marketing for the success of their business.
Independent retailers often offer goods/services generally not found in the big box stores. Additionally, they support their local communities – by keeping tax dollars at home, as well as sponsoring local events, school sports and many other organizations. Thereby, whenever we shop locally, we’re also supporting our hometowns.
In honor of TODAY, being National Caesar Salad Day, here is Mom’s copycat recipe for Caesar Salad; as seen in her last book, Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 47). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)].
Wednesday, July 6th is… National Hand Roll Day and National Fried Chicken Day! In honor of the latter, here’s a repeat of Mom’s KFC imitation – Oven-Fried Kentucky-Style Chicken; as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 89). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)].
As seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 94)… [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]*
The German community of Frankenmuth, Michigan, which for decades has celebrated the art of fried chicken (served family-style) has had thousands of customers lined up every weekend and holiday, waiting to be seated in one of their 2 large restaurants. Their fried chicken is like ‘Grandma used to make’ – richly flavored, moist inside and never greasy. The family-style dinner provides the table with large bowls of homemade mashed potatoes and gravy, moist and spicy dressing (called “stuffing” in other parts of the country), a fresh-from-scratch cranberry-orange relish, hot breads and beverages.
The fried chicken method:
Begin by setting your electric skillet at 400°F and melting ¼ pound margarine and ½ cup corn oil in it. Blend only until the margarine bubbles, without letting it change color. Don’t let it brown, please!
Run the pieces of a cut-up chicken fryer under cold water. Shake off the excess water but don’t let it get too dry. Dredge each piece evenly in flour, turning it over and over about 3 or 4 times to let the moisture of the chicken absorb the flour as you turn it and form a coating.
Place the floured pieces skin-side down in the oil/margarine mixture and, as it brown’s, sprinkle each piece with the following: 1/8 teaspoon onion salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, ¼ teaspoon paprika and a dash of sage.
When the skin-side of each piece is golden brown, turn and let the bone-side that you just seasoned, brown as well. Dust the browned side with the same 4 ingredients given above. Also sprinkle each piece, skin-side up and nicely browned, with 1 tablespoon flour per piece and then about 2 teaspoons of the drippings in which the chicken is being fried.
Rinse a baking pan in hot water and shake it off, but don’t dry it. Transfer chicken pieces to the moist pan, skin-side up, in a single layer. Put it in a 400°F oven to bake, uncovered, for about 30 minutes – for a moister coating cover the pan with foil as the chicken is baking. Serves 4.
Happy Monday and happy July to one and all! I hope everyone had a happy and safe 4th of July celebration yesterday! This is the first Monday of the second half of 2021 but I always look forward to all Mondays because they’re my 52 Chances each year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with all of you!
This coming Wednesday is, among other things, the 40th anniversary of Mom’s FIRST appearance on the Phil Donahue Show (July 7, 1981). That was undoubtedly the biggest milestone event in our family-run, dining-room-table, cottage operation, which had started 8 years before that! It was even an historic event for our small hometown, to say the least!
St. Clair’s little post office (which was serving, at that time, less than 5,000 citizens) was inundated with about a million letters, throughout the summer and fall; just from that episode airing and re-airing around the world for about a year, following the initial taping! It was truly an overwhelming response that none of us ever expected. More about that story appears in one of my early blogs, More than 15 Minutes of Fame.
Secret RecipesTM was just a family affair (other than an Administrative Assistant, who was also a family friend) until that summer, when my parents had to pay some summer temp-workers, who were actually my friends, to come in and help with all the extra mail. None of us had any idea of what the impact of such a popular, internationally syndicated show would be.
We were sending out hundreds of thousands of Mom’s sheets of “free recipes and product-ordering information” in all the SASEs (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes) that came in; as Mom offered during the show. There were also a lot of newsletter subscription orders that generated from those “free sheet” mailings, so once a month (for a while) the family also needed extra help just in putting address labels on the newsletter issues that were mailed out.
Mom’s copycat recipes revolution took the nation by storm and washed over the world – thanks to the Phil Donahue Show – like a tidal wave! Ever since her early cookbooks on the subject were first released in the mid-1970s, Mom referred to her copycat imitations as her solutions to “eating out – at home”, and that, she’d add, no longer meant hot dogs on the grill, in the backyard!
Word spread like a wildfire in the 1970s that a small town, Michigan housewife was duplicating famous foods from famous places and sharing her secrets in her self-published newsletter and cookbooks! Radio stations, newspapers, magazines and television – they all picked up on the story through the wire service (pre home computers and internet) and it snowballed from there. Here are a few of Mom’s stories about that first appearance on the Phil Donahue Show.
Additionally, tomorrow, July 6th, is National Fried Chicken Day! As such, here are a few more re-shares of Mom’s stories about imitating famous chicken dishes from places like KFC and Chicken-In-The-Ruff; each followed by re-shares of her copycat recipes for them, as well!
AGAIN, MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, pages 87-88)
[A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)]
CHICKEN…
FRIED CHICKEN has always been a basic American favorite, even before it was a restaurant offering. It was ‘down-home’ and wholesome and has never lost its popularity. When Colonel Harland Sanders, in his retirement years, took a can of his favorite secret spices & herbs and his precious fryer and traveled across the country demonstrating his technique for preparing chicken. No one dreamed it would someday become one of the most successful corporations of the American restaurant industry, much less of the American free enterprise system, itself!
There are names that will be identified with fried chicken for a long time to come that include Church’s Fried Chicken, Brown’s, Popeye’s, Original Recipe, Banquet Fried Chicken, Pioneer Fried Chicken, Southern Fried Chicken and, of course, the leader of the industry, Kentucky Fried Chicken, which will be familiar to us with an affectionate regard, as we recall the big bucket at the top of the pole revolving above the Colonel’s restaurants across the country – and now across the world!
There are very minute differences between these popular restaurants in the way that their individual recipes are prepared. At home, when you want definite inspiration in preparing your own fried chicken, I have given you only a few of the great versions. There are many more, but the side dishes that accompanied the chicken in these various restaurants deserve some attention as well. I have included some of these in this section.
My own favorite is still the original recipe that we sampled when we were traveling in Ontario many, many years ago, and stopped at the White Horse Inn, where the Colonel, himself, was preparing his chicken and passing samples around to the customers. If the owners of the restaurant liked the response, Harland Sanders would provide them with the spices and the technique for preparing it under his name, which he eventually did – growing to the largest in the business.
THE SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE – WITH THE COLONEL’S HELP
I look back now to 1976 and 1977 and realize how fortunate I was to have had my life touched by so many helpful people – so many famous people! It’s almost incredible that what started out to be merely the frosting on the cake, of my monthly newsletter, soon became the whole cake!
While duplicating the secrets of the food and restaurant industry was only going to be a part of the publication I was writing, it was a surprise to me that the interest and the response from the public led to my specializing in the fast food division entirely! I thought my first book was going to be my ‘only’ book on that subject, but – six books later – I was still seriously, but lovingly, engaged in the pursuit of new information and challenging recipe imitations.
I’ve been asked by restaurants to give them permission to use my recipes and say so on their menus. I’ve been asked by ‘People’ magazine, at least once a month for six months – even before the Donahue show appearance – to grant them an interview. The fact that I had declined the invitation because I couldn’t handle any additional mail, made the columns of the Detroit Free Press, when their ‘Tip-Off’ columnist said it was ‘classy’ to turn down People Magazine – refusing publicity in a national magazine because I did not want to ‘get big’!
[NOTE: As I mentioned in previous blog posts, Mom did eventually grant “People” magazine an interview, which appeared in the issue dated May 7th, 1990.]
It was just good business sense to me. For like Maurice and Dick McDonald, I like what I’m doing and having somebody else do it for me, as Ray Kroc did it for the two brothers, would be like Liberace having somebody play the piano for him.
However, one of the most important turning points in the events of my recipe work was the influence that Col. Harland Sanders had over me and his direct suggestions on how to make my fried chicken recipe more like the one he originally developed!
With the tests for COUNTERFEITING FRIED CHICKEN AT HOME that was as good as what you could buy out – but for less – I felt I HAD to have a pressure fryer. This meant I had to have a place to also put it in my kitchen, which was already bursting at the seams with appliances and gadgets and utensils I really didn’t get enough use from, as it was.
Then one summer, while visiting relatives in West Virginia, we sampled some pan-fried home-style chicken that was every bit as good as the chicken produced in a pressure fryer. Paul’s 82-year-old-and blamed why the chicken always came out just right every time she made it, which was religiously every Sunday! It was the pan!
She used an 80-year-old wrought iron skillet that had never been washed in soap and water. She ‘seasoned’ it was shortening – lard, mostly. She kept it in the oven of her wood-burning, porcelain enamel dough, where it was always warm.
The fried chicken recipe that first called attention to my recipes nationally – through the ‘National Enquirer’, ‘Money Magazine’, ‘Catholic Digest’, ‘The Christian Science Monitor’, ‘Campus Life Magazine’ and, yes, even ‘Playboy Magazine’ – was this following combination of ingredients.
The method is quite unorthodox and the original idea for developing it in this manner, came from a conversation I had with ‘Col. Sanders’ over the air with radio station WFAA in Dallas when I was a regular guest on a talk show with them for several months. We discussed the secrets of the food industry with listeners by phone from our homes.
The Colonel was fascinated by the publicity I had received for my “Big Bucket in the Sky” fried chicken recipe and agreed that I was on the right track if I’d add more pepper. He loved pepper! He also suggested browning the chicken in a skillet and then oven-baking it until tender to achieve a likeness more to the original recipe he had created in 1964. He told me to look around the grocery store for 1 packaged product to replace the 11 spices – which I did diligently – and discovered that powdered Italian salad dressing mix was the secret!
So, I set to work to revamp the recipe. My original recipe was quite close to the famous Colonel’s product, but the coating kept falling off – because, as he explained, I couldn’t get the oil hot enough. He liked peanut oil, himself, but suggested that I could achieve a similar result by using corn or Crisco oil – with 1 cup solid Crisco for every 4 cups of oil. He talked about the quality in his product changing after turning the business over to new owners.
When Heublein Conglomerate bought out the franchise, they paid a few million dollars for ‘The Colonel’s’ recipe and technique. It seemed unlikely that a home-kitchen-rendition of such a famous product could be had for the price of my book. But the letters came in – ‘best chicken we ever had’; ‘LOVED that fried chicken recipe’; ‘our favorite chicken recipe… and ‘maybe the Colonel should have YOUR recipe!’
In honor of TODAY, being National Graham Cracker Day, here is Mom’s copycat recipes for “Chocolate-Covered Graham Crackers” & “Chocolate Coating For Graham Crackers”, like Keebler’s; as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 228) [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)].
Happy Monday, happy July, and happy National Fried Chicken Day! As always, #TGIM – I continually look forward to Mondays because they are my #52Chances each year, in which I have to share my memories of Mom!
I can’t believe it’s July already! I hope everyone enjoyed the nice, long Independence Day weekend in some way, safely. A lot of people around us, were having their own backyard celebrations all weekend.
As I mentioned above, today is National Fried Chicken Day – which makes it a finger licking good day in my book – and tomorrow will actually be the 39th anniversary of when Mom FIRST appeared on the Phil Donahue Show (July 7, 1981); demonstrating, among other things, how she imitatedfried chicken like the Colonel’s right at home!
As I’ve written about previously, that show was definitely a milestone event, to say the least – for our family as well as our community! Because of Mom’s appearance, our small post office in St. Clair was swamped with about a million letters, throughout that summer and fall. The requests and orders generated from that show, as it aired and re-aired around the world for about a year, just kept pouring in! It was truly an overwhelming response that none of us ever expected.
Donahue 1981 promo
Mom has written many stories about her experiences, on TV and radio shows, related to her KFC-style chicken imitation, which she called “Big Bucket In The Sky! Chicken”. Below is just one of those stories, from her book, My Cup Runneth Over And I Can’t Find My Mop, and a copy of that recipe.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, pp. 71-72)
HISTORY BOOKS have said little of the one person who really put the state of Kentucky on the map, namely the gentleman whom will always be associated with ‘finger-lickin’-good’ fried chicken, Harland Sanders. He was born in Henryville, Indiana in 1890, and died in late 1980.
Harland was one of the food industry’s most successful men. In 1956, Harland Sanders was an out-of-work 66-year-old [man]. When he died, he left a multi-million-dollar food empire. One survey said that, next to Santa Claus, he was the world’s most recognized personality.
When he founded KFC, he had taken his Social Security check, a pressure-Fryer, a can of spices and herbs and set out across the country to show a few restaurant owners how to fry chicken the ‘right’ way! If they liked it, he promised to supply them with the secret coding.
He was a born salesman! And successfully so, considering the number of jobs he held in a lifetime. Once, over WFAA-Radio, in Dallas, I had the pleasure of speaking with the Colonel and it was that conversation, set up by the host of the show I worked with every Thursday, that gave me the clue on how to season flower at home so that it would taste like the Colonel’s coating on his Kentucky fried chicken.
He had just sold that business to the Heublein liquor and food conglomerate, for around $2 million and it was (quote) ‘the dumbest thing I ever did do!’ He complained that the gravy tasted like ‘wallpaper paste’ and the chicken was ‘dry as cardboard’ and that his recipe and technique had been so terribly altered that he was sick about it.
But he was also being taken to court by the company to which he sold KFC. To prove his point, he told me, in court, he prepared his chicken the right way and passed it out to the jury, the judge and the court along with the bucket of chicken purchased down the street from a KFC unit. The court ruled in his favor.
He told me he had read about our recipes in the Corbin, Kentucky newspaper and that he was flattered with my version of his product, but that I didn’t have to go to all of the trouble of imitating 11 herbs and spices.
He said he wanted to see just what kind of a detective I REALLY was, so he told me to go to the supermarket and find one product in a (quote) ‘package’ that would do the same job as those 11 herbs and spices. And I was to report back to him on the radio show the following Thursday. We tested a dozen or more products during the next six days. And finally I found Good Seasons Italian Dressing mix! It was wonderful!
Original illustration by Gloria Pitzer; edited by Laura Emerich
‘You really are a detective after all,’ Colonel Sanders told me on the air that next week, by telephone from his home in Kentucky. I was on the phone from our home in St. Clair. So it was, indeed, the Colonel himself who put me on the right track with this recipe, and with thousands of people listening in the Dallas area. I am so grateful for this wonderful experience. My cup runneth over!
It was also in the conversation with the Colonel that I was urged not to sell my business as long, he told me, as I had the energy and the aptitude to run it myself. At the conclusion of the lawsuit, I was pleased to see that the company was moved to improve the product and give it back its original goodness. Harland remained as a public relations representative for them until the time he passed away.
Most interesting about his background was that he was eight years old when he was turning out entire menus of American delicacies for his widowed mother, while he took care of the house and did the cooking so that she could work.
He said he went on to become a streetcar conductor, a farmhand, (to Cuba as) a soldier, a railroad fireman, section hand, insurance agent, a steamboat promoter, gaslight manufacturer, tire salesman and, finally, as a service station operator in Corbin, Kentucky.
When they could, Harland and his wife, Claudia, enjoy dining at the Elmwood Inn, in Berryville (KY), where as you might expect, his favorite dish was chicken! Given the honorary title of ‘Colonel’ by the state of Kentucky, for his contributions to its cuisine, he remains one of the most respected and recognized figures in the food industry.
I also tell you in detail, in that book, about our visit to The Donahue Show when I was asked to prepare the famous chicken on camera for millions of viewers and, instead of a deep fryer, the staff provided me, by mistake, with a toaster oven.
Still shot from mom’s Phil Donahue appearance 4-16-93
The recipe had to be revamped right then and there on camera. It worked out so well that we have, since that experience, included the ‘oven-fried’ version on our sheet of sample recipes, which we have probably sent without charge, just for a self-addressed, stamped envelope, to over a few million people!
Here is a copy of that “Big Bucket In The Sky! Chicken”recipe, as I’ve given out in a previous blog post and, also, posted under the “Recipes” tab, on this website:
See also https://therecipedetective.com/2018/11/06/big-bucket-in-the-sky-fried-chicken/ for another version included in this story.
July happens to be National Picnic Month, among other things. When I pack up a summer picnic for me and my husband, I like to use the same classics that Mom used to always make. I can’t eat them now, but I always loved her homemade fudge brownies, chocolate chip cookies, coleslaw, potato salad and, of course, fried chicken (which is always great, hot or cold)! My husband still enjoys them, on my behalf, while I now make low-carb dishes for myself. Our favorite picnic standards are very similar to those listed on HowStuffWorks.com, in Sara Elliott’s informative article, Top 10 Picnic Foods.
At our house ‘eating out’ meant roasting hot dogs in the front yard. But then, we didn’t know of many restaurants where 5 children, who hated green vegetables and spilled catsup on the tablecloths, were welcomed. I had to learn to cook by default…the way I saw it, as long as my husband could get marvelous fried chicken at home, why should he take me to Colonel Sanders’? – Gloria Pitzer [“No Laughing Matter”, This Cook is Rated X (or) Yes, Gloria! There Really is a Colonel Sanders (no date available – circa 1970s)]
Frankenmuth, Michigan is a city that has been world-famous, for many decades, for their family-style, sit-down, fried chicken dinners. This wonderful little town is not too far from us, near Saginaw, MI – from where one of Mom’s favorite radio shows still airs, “Listen to the Mrs.”, co-hosted by Art Lewis and Ann Williams on WSGW-Radio. Not now because of the pandemic, but normally tourists flock to this little German-style town from all around the world and will stand in line for hours to get their world-famous chicken dinners at one of the two largest establishments in town.
The two major restaurants in Frankenmuth that serve the famous family-style chicken dinners are Zehnders and the BavarianInn. The town’s German heritage exudes from its many restaurants, hotels, breweries and quaint little shops that line the mile-plus length of the main street through town – from Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland (which is all Christmas, all year) to the Frankenmuth Brewery!
Mom and Dad loved to take road trips to Frankenmuth, as do my husband and me. Although we can’t right now because of Covid-19 restrictions – we’re looking forward to a great day trip there in the future. I miss all the German culture experience that this small tourist town has to offer! Over the 40 years that Mom investigated different restaurant dishes as “The Recipe DetectiveTM”, she came up with many imitations from Frankenmuth of some of the famous dishes available at the two major restaurants mentioned above; plus, some bread and confection imitations from the local bakeries and fudge shops, as well.
