I can tell you from personal experience that it takes longer than 7 minutes to cook KFC chicken. More like 20. My wife and I stopped at one of those combo KFC/Taco Bell places for lunch on a road trip once, and ordered some KFC. The guy who took our order did not bother to tell us that they were out of chicken and were cooking more. (And then he promptly disappeared after he took our order.) After about 15 minutes I went back up to the counter, flagged someone down, asked what was taking so long, and that’s when I was told that the chicken was still cooking. And it was at least another five minutes before they finally brought our food out.
KFC had grown very rapidly in the years immediately prior to this. Up until the early 1950s, at least, I don’t think there was even much in the way of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants at all; Sanders’ first business model was licensing the recipe to existing restaurants. His own claim of 900 locations is probably an exaggeration of sorts, I think he’s including recipe licensees.
It was AFTER 1963 that KFC really exploded in popularity and became a household name; within ten years it was many, many times larger and had expanded outside the USA.
Sanders’ unique (entirely affected) appearance would not have been around that long in 1963 as a cultural icon, and as MrAtoz points out, early WML panellists were often people who rarely left New York City, and may not have had much opportunity to come across KFC.
Well, according to the patent that Colonel Sanders obtained, it’s supposed to be about 8 minutes.
“The cold chicken quickly (in I to 2 minutes) lowers the temperature of the accurately measured quantity of fat to a temperature of 250 P. Then the chicken should be cooked for about 8 minutes under about pounds per square inch of gauge pressure to maintain the 250 F. cooking temperature without further loss of moisture from the breading and without any drying out of the chicken pieces.”
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3245800?oq=inassignee:"Kentucky+Fried+Chicken+Co"
Kilgallen was a sharp journalist. Some may not know that she died of alcohol and barbiturate overdose in 1965. They paid tribute to her on What’s My Line, the following week. There is some conspiracy theory concerning her death, related to her reporting on the Kennedy assassination.
Tribute:
When I first encountered Kentucky Fried Chicken it was as something sold at Gino Marchetti’s fast food restaurant circa 1966. I didn’t know there were separate, free-standing KFCs until much later.
There were pictures of Sanders inside. He also appeared in the Jerry Lewis movie The Big Mouth (1967) and in publicity for the movie*. KFC (although not Sanders) also appeared in the justly forgotten 1966 Soupy Sales movie Birds Do It (which even Sales hated).
But a shot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant – complete with a depiction of Colonel Sanders – appears in the background in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger. You’d think some people would recognize him from that.
- according to the Internet Movie Database, Sanders himself appeared in four movies between 1967 and 1970, with The Big Mouth being the earliest. He was also on I’ve Got a Secret as well as What’s My Line?, but that was before his movie appearances.
Huh - well if that’s the case, they must have waited about 10 minutes after we ordered before starting to cook more chicken. 
(It’s possible we happened to walk in right at a shift change - which would explain why our order taker mysteriously vanished, and also why they dropped the ball on getting more chicken cooked.)
And we sometimes see her skills during the program when she asks a series of perceptive questions and nails down the job without the others needing to do a thing.
Gino’s was my only source for KFC in the 60s (in South Jersey). I loved Gino’s. Wish they were still around. They re-opened in a few locations ~2010, but I believe they all failed.
I remember eating at Gino’s in northern NJ when in the early 1970s, until one day my Mom was disappointed in a burger there, which meant we didn’t go there any more.
I met the Colonel in 1974 at a hotel in Lousiville, KY. It was his birthday and the ballroom had a large party for him. As I walked past he waved and said, “Come on down - there’s chicken for everyone!” That’s how I remember him. There was a KFC in some small Ohio town that had a shrine to the Colonel. They had one of his suits on display in a lighted niche along with other memorabilia. They also had waiters that brought your food after you ordered and sat down.
As for the 900 locations, that sounds doubtful they could have that many and not be well known. In June, 1960 McDonald’s opened store number 195 in Lorain, Ohio where I lived. It was anticipated and well known at the time. We used to drive by and see how many burgers had been sold as they constantly updated the number on the sign.
And my wife still calls it Kenny Kings.
Would that have been Lima, Ohio?
It might be eight minutes after it comes to pressure and doesn’t include the pressurization and depressurization of the vessel. A lot of Instant Pot recipes have the same issue.
I heard the studio wanted her to be a dramatic actress, and she wanted to sing (she had a sweet duet with William Powell in Life with Father). But she was an awesome comedienne.
Or am I getting her confused with Rosalind Russell? In any case, both actresses are wonderful with comedy.
And, yes, Penny Serenade is way too sad to watch more than once.
My brother’s wife is from New Jersey (she’s about 66? now), and she said she’d never think of going into NYC in jeans when she was a teenager. For me, growing up in SoCal, it was in comprehensible there was somewhere you couldn’t go wearing jeans!
It’s a big country; 900 isn’t all that many. As of 2018, there are 19,495 incorporated cities, towns and villages in the United States. I didn’t try to hunt up the figures for 1963; but I doubt they were drastically different.
And those 900 wouldn’t have been spread evenly geographically over roughly 19 thousand; there would have been a lot of them in some parts of the country, and none in other parts.
A significant distance upstate from New York City, near Poughkeepsie, in the 1950’s and early 1960’s one did not wear jeans into villages, never mind New York City (except, I suppose, around one’s own house if that was in the village; or on picnics or things of that sort.)
My mother and sisters and I put on skirts to go do the grocery shopping or anything else of the sort, even in a village considerably smaller than Poughkeepsie in the middle of what was then farming country; my father, who hated ties, would put one on.
By the end of the 1960’s you could wear jeans almost anywhere.
She sung very well, and had gone to a conservatory for voice. A lot of her films have gratuitous singing bits for her.
She was indeed an awesome comedienne, but she was an awesome dramatic actress as well.
Funny, she was in a few films where she is the star, and someone who became famous later was a supporting performer-- but when the film in marketed now, the now-famous person is billed as the star. Lucille Ball fans who buy The Joy of Living must be disappointed (albeit, it is an interesting peek at her early career). Ditto Astaire-Rogers fans who buy Roberta.
I should clarify: When I said the show was informal, I wasn’t referring to (or even thinking about) the manners and etiquette. I was referring to the simple and seemingly informal rules of the game, which John Daly enforced very loosely and arbitrarily. He was often especially capricious in flipping over those cards, as happened both at the beginning and end of the Colonel Sanders episode. Nobody took it too seriously. I presume this was simply because of the low-dollar stakes of the game.
There was no panel of judges or moderators other than Daly himself.
Yeah, I thought it was the pressure frying method (and its results) that was the biggest innovation and draw to KFC more so than the famous “herbs & spices” marketing stuff.
Except that I don’t recall the pressure cooker being a particularly widely advertised thing. I don’t think “Cooked in The Colonel’s Special Trademarked Pressure Cooker” would have been such a big advertising attraction. The heavily-advertised “Secret Blend of 11 Herbs And Spices” would be a bigger marketing draw, I think.
Almost undoubtedly so, and it’s yielded decades of speculation as to what those herbs and spices are.
An anecdote about that recipe: in the 1990s, one of my managers at my first job had left, to take a similar position in the market research department at KFC. One of the projects he worked on was an effort by KFC to return the recipe to something closer to what Colonel Sanders had originally developed.
He and I were talking on the phone about it one day, and he mentioned them going back to the Colonel’s old formula. I quipped, “Let me guess, it’s hand-written on a yellowed piece of paper, in a safe, in the Colonel’s old office.” My old boss was quiet for a moment, then replied, “You don’t know how close that is to the truth.” 