On this day in 1890, Harland Sanders was born in Henryville, Indiana. He kept a lot of jobs before he kept a restaurant, and I find that enormously cheering: the man was in his sixties before he went out selling franchises, which is roughly the age most of us are told to stop lifting the big pot.

But it's his method I keep coming back to, because a method is a document. Pan-fried chicken done properly is slow, and slow is fine at home when there's one skillet and nobody waiting. In a roadside kitchen, slow is a queue out the door. So he used a pressure cooker, and that's the whole hinge of it. Higher heat inside a sealed pot, steam doing work the open air can't, and a bird finished in a fraction of the time with the meat still holding its juice instead of turning to string. Seasoned flour, hot fat, lid down, wait. He kept his seasoning blend to himself, which is a baker's right and a cook's right too.

Anything that lets you feed forty people without the last twenty getting the sad end of the batch is good engineering. He carried on as the face of the thing until he died in 1980, in a white suit, at an age when most people have handed over the tongs. Somewhere in there is a lesson about second acts, and I intend to remember it around four in the morning when my own oven is sulking.