Big Secrets Read online

  William Poundstone

  BIG SECRETS

  The Uncensored Truth

  About All Sorts of Stuff

  You Are Never

  Supposed to Know

  To Judith Schnerk

  Contents

  Preface

  PART ONE Going to Hell in a Shopping Basket

  1. Kentucky Fried Chicken

  2. Food Horror Stories

  3. Coca-Cola

  4. Uncolas

  5. Liqueurs and Bitters

  PART TWO Everything You Owe Is Wrong

  6. Weird Stuff on Money

  7. Currency Paper

  8. Credit Cards

  9. The VOID Pop-up

  10. The Universal Product Code

  PART THREE Kids, Don’t Try This at Home

  11. Perfumes

  12. Playing Cards

  13. Letters, Stamps, and Envelopes

  14. Paraphernalia

  PART FOUR Alice, Let’s Cheat

  15. The Eye Test

  16. The Rorschach Test

  17. The Lie-Detector Test

  18. How to Crash the Freemasons

  PART FIVE Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

  19. David Copperfield’s Dancing Handkerchief in a Bottle

  20. Harry Blackstone, Jr.’s Sawing a Woman in Two

  21. Uri Geller’s Blindfold Drive

  22. Doug Henning’s Vanishing Horse and Rider

  23. The Amazing Kreskin’s Social Security Number Divination

  PART SIX Always the Last to Know

  24. Did Neil Armstrong Blow His Lines?

  25. Secret Radio Frequencies

  26. Secret Messages on Records

  27. Subliminal Shots in Movies

  28. Is Walt Disney Frozen?

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  The subject matter of this book ought not to exist at all. This is a book about institutional secrets—big secrets, secrets that affect the masses. It may seem incredible that something like a club handshake or a franchised fried chicken recipe can remain a secret. Surely too many insiders know the secret (and might talk). Surely too many outsiders are exposed to the secret (and might surmise it). Yet, by and large, institutional secrets remain secrets.

  No harm is done by most institutional secrets. But it is only natural to be curious about them. The best gossip, after all, is gossip somebody doesn’t want you to hear. Would anyone other than a chemist care what is in Coca-Cola if the Coca-Cola Company were not so loath to discuss the ingredients? Would the reversed message in Pink Floyd’s The Wall be as intriguing if you could play it on an ordinary stereo? Would you puzzle over Doug Henning’s magic if not for his smug assurance that you really don’t want to know how it is done? Here, then, is a whole book about what people don’t want you to know.

  Few secrets are imponderable mysteries. The knack of doing a book such as this is to find out whom to talk to. I have been aided by all those who suggested topics or lines of research, directed me to friends of friends, revealed secrets, and provided advice and assistance. Thanks to Benton Arnovitz, Nicholas Bakalar, James S. Bradbury, Michael Chellel, Karon Corley, the staff of the Cornell University libraries, Paul Crouch, Jr., Mitch Douglas, Norman Farnsworth, Charles P. Grier, Cynthia Hayes, Luis Herrero, E. J. Kahn, Jr., Valerie Battle Kienzle, Gerry Kroll, Stuart C. Lernerand the staff of Associated Analytical Laboratories, James Mastroberti, Russell D. Meltzer, Cheryl Messemer, Julia F. Morton, Ric Myers, Gloria and Paul Pitzer, George A. Pollak, Stefan Rudolf and the staff of High Rise Sound, Daniel Schindler, Beverly Smith, Stewart Stogel, Barry Streims, Theresa Sullivan, and Rosalie Muller Wright.

  And thanks especially to those who asked that their names not be mentioned.

  PART ONE

  Going to Hell in a Shopping Basket

  It’s really your parents’ fault. But how were they supposed to know that the Gee-Whiz ElectroShock Toilet Trainer wasn’t the latest scientific development? Now you’ve got the cleanest apartment in town and a five-dollar-a-day Bon Ami habit. You’re on a first-name basis with E. coli And you know it’s a none-too-spic-’n’-span world out there, chock full of lax personal hygiene and shrimp somebody forgot to devein. Given the propensity of hairnets for finding their way into corn dogs, you probably like to know exactly what’s in food before you eat it. Well, tough. The processed-food industry isn’t a restaurant, and you’ll have to take what everyone else is eating. Food is not enough; most people want mystery. Secret recipes, secret sauces, secret spices. Millions of hearty eaters like postindustrial je ne sais quoi and are willing to pay for it. If there’s a life beyond Dr Pepper, it’s as welcome at the Safeway as a wet cleanup in aisle nine. Mom was right: Don’t play with your food; you never know where it’s been.

  But how can big companies keep their secret recipes secret from the hundreds of employees who prepare the stuff? They can’t. As the following pages demonstrate, the corporate grapevines have plenty to say.

  1.

  Kentucky Fried Chicken

  As far as anyone knows, Colonel Harland Sanders revealed his recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken to just two living souls. One was his wife, Claudia. The other was Jack C. Massey, head of the three-man syndicate that purchased the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation from Sanders in 1964.

  Apparently, none of the five thousand Kentucky Fried Chicken franchisees has ever been told the full recipe. New restaurant operators attend “KFC University,” a company-owned outlet in Louisville. There they are initiated into the special cooking method. They aren’t told what is in the seasoning mix, however. Franchisees must buy the seasonings premixed from the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation. Some outlets buy ten-ounce packets of seasonings that are to be mixed with twenty-five pounds of flour. Others buy a preseasoned coating mix that contains the flour.

  No Platinum in There

  Ever since the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain mushroomed in the mid-1960s, the secret recipe has been the object of speculation. Examination of the chicken shows that the coating is a thin, almost soggy layer (in the “original recipe”; there is also a “spicycrispy” version) adhering to the skin. The meat is notably moist, allegedly because of the special pressure-cooking process. There is little popular conviction as to what seasonings figure in the “secret blend of eleven herbs and spices.” The chicken is flavorful, but no herb or spice predominates. The New York Times quoted Sanders as maintaining that the herbs and spices “stand on everybody’s shelf.”

  The presumption that the seasonings in Kentucky Fried Chicken are in fact perfectly ordinary ones has long been a bone of contention between franchisees and Kentucky Fried Chicken management. Restaurateurs are charged a steep price for the seasonings—more than any conceivable combination of herbs and spices ought to cost, say franchisees. In a 1976 book on McDonald’s (Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s by Max Boas and Steven Chain), McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc observed: “Kentucky Fried Chicken licensees claimed that they were paying three to four to five times for the same herbs and for the same chicken, and that they could get it from Durkee’s or Kraft or any big company in the United States. And Kentucky Fried Chicken said, no, you couldn’t because the formula was a secret. You know that was a lot of crap. Any laboratory can tell you what’s in it. There’s no platinum in there. There’s no gold in there.”

  That there isn’t platinum or eye of passenger pigeon in the mix is supported by the fact that the colonel occasionally whipped up the seasoning mixture impromptu. In Sanders’ autobiography, Life as I Have Known It Has Been Finger Lickin, Good, he tells of selling his first franchisee, Leon “Pete” Harmon, on the chicken. Sanders concocted a batch of the seasoning mix from the pantry o
f Harmon’s Salt Lake City restaurant.

  Granting that all of the colonel’s seasonings could be found at any well-stocked A&P, the task of identifying them remains formidable. There are approximately forty herbs, spices, and other seasonings available in American supermarkets and gourmet stores. Of these, perhaps twenty or thirty are common enough to “stand on everybody’s shelf,” figuratively speaking, and to have been in use at Sanders’ roadside cafe. The use of eleven different seasonings is not remarkable. The standard “poultry seasoning” of the food industry has ten herbs and spices: pepper, ginger, mace, allspice, cloves, marjoram, nutmeg, thyme, savory, and sage.

  In 1974 Esquire magazine asked four food writers to try Kentucky Fried Chicken and offer their analyses. There was little consensus.

  James Beard found the chicken “well seasoned with salt”; with less assurance, he thought he detected monosodium glutamate, cayenne pepper, and cinnamon. Roy Andries de Groot was “reasonably sure of minuscule amounts” of rosemary, savory, tarragon, thyme, pepper, turmeric, and cinnamon. He also noted salt, monosodium glutamate, “tiny globules of what might be honey or brown sugar,” and “the faintest touch of both almond and mint.” Waverly Root concluded that the chicken was “dunked in some sort of batter” containing flour, milk, and perhaps egg. Root was certain only of salt and pepper in the seasoning; he guessed that celery salt, caraway, chili powder, and/or horseradish might be present. James Villas doubted that any milk or egg was used in the coating and further doubted that there were eleven herbs and spices. He detected only cinnamon and cloves. Villas argued that the secret of Kentucky Fried Chicken is sugar: “Real fried chicken is not sweet; this is.” The sugar, he suspected, was added to the “very light and very safe and very healthy cooking oil.”

  Another analysis comes from Gloria Pitzer, a St. Clair, Michigan, homemaker and newsletter publisher. Pitzer’s Secret Recipe Report attempts to duplicate the recipes of popular processed foods for home use. In the late 1970s, Pitzer devised three recipes for facsimile Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  The recipes call for the chicken pieces to be fried in a pan or deep fryer until brown and then transferred to an oven for thirty to thirty-five minutes’ additional cooking. One-fourth to one-half inch of water in the baking pan keeps the chicken moist in the oven. In Pitzer’s first recipe, the chicken is seasoned with a marinade made from commercial Italian salad dressing mix, flour salt, lemon juice, and oil.

  Pitzer’s second and third recipes use eleven herbs and spices each. The second, said to simulate spicy-crispy Kentucky Fried Chicken, requires garlic salt, onion powder, paprika, black pepper, allspice, sweet basil, oregano, sage, summer savory (substitution: parsley flakes), ginger, and rosemary. All are mixed with flour and salt. Chicken pieces are dampened with beer or club soda, dredged in the flour/seasoning mix, and fried.

  The third recipe uses a modified list of herbs and spices: rosemary, oregano, sage, ginger, marjoram, thyme, parsley, pepper, paprika, garlic salt, and onion salt. Three additional flavorings—brown sugar, powdered chicken bouillon, and Lipton Tomato Cup-a-Soup mix—supplement the herbs and spices. Pitzer’s recipes are the result of her own experimentation; she disavows any special knowledge of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s actual recipe.

  Does Phyllis George Know the Colonel’s Recipe?

  As late as June 1967, Business Week magazine could claim that “only Sanders, Massey [then chairman of the board of the corporation], and the company’s food engineer know the recipe.” This was not strictly correct. Sanders’ wife, Claudia, certainly knew the recipe. It may be conjectured that other spouses, children, and business associates were told too.

  Who Told Whom?

  The Kentucky Fried Chicken Recipe

  Claudia Sanders was a former employee at the Sanders Café in Corbin, Kentucky. In 1948 she became Sanders’ second wife. Interstate 75 diverted the tourist traffic from the Sanders motel/restaurant operation, forcing them to sell. The colonel took to the road at age sixty-six to promote his chicken franchise business. He had twenty-five white suits, always traveled with a pressure cooker and a bag of seasonings in the back seat of his Packard, and ate his chicken three to five times a week. Claudia stayed at home, mixed the secret seasonings, and sent them to franchisees. The colonel sold the business—too soon, too cheaply—in 1964, retaining the Canadian operation. He spent his last years praising the Lord and cursing the Heublein Corporation, which purchased the business from Sanders’ buyers. Harland Sanders died in 1980 at the age of ninety. Claudia is proprietor of Claudia Sanders’ Dinner House in Shelbyville, Kentucky.

  It is hard to believe that the children weren’t let in on the secret recipe. Sanders had two, both by his first marriage. At least one, Margaret, played a crucial role in the business by coming up with the idea of take-out service. For this Sanders gave her the franchise to the state of Florida. Margaret Sanders now lives in Palm Springs; sister Mildred Ruggles lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

  The secret passed out of the family in 1964, when Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken to a three-man syndicate for $2 million. Heading the syndicate was Jack C. Massey, a Nashville financier who had become bored with early retirement in Florida. Massey knew the secret, and so did food engineer Art Pelster. Pelster, originally an aerospace engineer, was in charge of mixing up the seasonings and refining the cooking method. He invented and patented several new types of frying and heating equipment for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Seven years after Massey’s group bought the company, it was sold to Heublein, Inc.—purveyors of Smirnoff vodka, Al steak sauce, Snap-E-Tom tomato cocktail, Beaulieu Vineyard wines, Ortega Mexican food, and Arrow liqueurs—for a reported $287 million.

  It is uncertain if Massey’s two partners knew the recipe. One, Utah franchisee Leon “Pete” Harmon, seems to have had little role in day-to-day management. The other partner was attorney John Y. Brown, Jr. Brown helped convince Sanders to sell. After the sale, Massey groomed Brown to succeed him, and it seems a reasonable conjecture that Massey told Brown the secret recipe. Brown replaced Massey as chief executive officer and served as chairman of the board after the Heublein acquisition. (Massey left the company, reportedly after a tiff with Brown.) Profits from the sale to Heublein helped finance Brown’s late, successful entry in the 1979 Kentucky gubernatorial race. Young, bright, and skillful at answering charges that he swindled an old man out of a chicken business, Brown is said to have higher political ambitions. (“Hell, governing Kentucky is easier than running Kentucky Fried Chicken,” he told the press. “There’s no competition.”)

  So the chain of initiates grew. If Brown knows the secret recipe, wouldn’t he have told his wife, Phyllis George? Perhaps. A much-touted secret recipe might be more interesting to spouses, relatives, and friends than the average trade secret. A dozen or more people may now know the secret recipe, many of them not directly connected with the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation.

  If so, they’ve been circumspect. No one has come forward to reveal the secret recipe.

  Laboratory Analysis

  Big Secrets selected a large college near a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Advertisements asking that Kentucky Fried Chicken employees respond were placed in a student newspaper and on campus bulletin boards. Interviews with respondents revealed how the chicken is prepared. In essence, the descriptions agreed with Sanders’ 1966 patent for a “process of producing fried chicken under pressure” (no. 3,245,800; copies available from the U.S. Patent Office).

  The patent, of course, does not tell what seasonings are used. None of the respondents to the ads knew what seasonings are in the coating mix. Nor had they heard any rumors. But one respondent supplied a sample of the coating mix: a pungent-smelling white powder with black and tan flecks.

  On the basis of Kroc’s contention that any laboratory could tell what’s in the mix, a food laboratory was consulted. It refused to do an analysis after hearing where the sample had come from. A second laboratory agreed to do an analysis. Approximately one cup of coating mix w
as sent for testing. The laboratory was asked to do a qualitative analysis—to identify everything in the sample, but not to worry about determining exact proportions. A list of likely herbs and spices compiled from Pitzer’s recipes, the Esquire article, and the ingredients of the standard poultry seasoning was supplied as a starting point.

  Based on the interviews, Sanders’ patent, and the lab results, the secret recipe goes roughly like this:

  Chickens weighing between 2¼ and 2½ pounds are preferred. They are cut into eight to ten pieces. What makes the Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe different from most others is that the quantity of chicken must be geared to the amount and temperature of the oil. If you try cooking just one piece of chicken in the usual amount of oil at the usual temperature, you get a cinder. This is why Sanders’ method has not been duplicated widely at home.

  For the typical five-pound batch cited in the patent, about eight quarts of oil at 400° F is needed. Sanders reasons in the patent description as follows: Chicken cooked by ordinary means tends to lose its natural moisture before the meat is fully done. Chicken tends to be undercooked or dried out. The obvious remedy is to cook the chicken in a watery liquid. Then the chicken looks and tastes “boiled.” Furthermore, if a browned coating is desired, it often requires higher temperatures or longer cooking times than is appropriate for the chicken proper.

  Sanders’ solution is to start the cooking process at about 400° F—a high temperature that quickly browns the coating. A pressure cooker supplied with an air hose and pump is used. Continued cooking at 400 ° would incinerate the chicken, but the cold chicken and the generation of steam from the moisture in the coating lower the temperature of the cooking fat to about 250° F in a minute or two. The heating elements are then turned down to maintain a 250° F temperature throughout the remainder of the cooking cycle.