Father figure
Tommy and his wife, Cherry, are hardly adventurers out for a quick buck. They own the Claudia Sanders Dinner House in Shelbyville, Ky. “My father died when I was 7,” Cherry Settle says, “and the Colonel kind of took on that role.”

When Cherry married Tommy, the Colonel walked her down the aisle. He'd already sold them the Shelbyville restaurant, along with the white house next door.

Cherry found the leather-bound ledger a year and a half ago. “It was in the basement with a bunch of other stuff. He wrote down everything, how much he paid for meals. Wasn't much of a tipper,” Cherry observes. “A quarter, 15 cents.” Inside the book was a list of spices, 11 of them. And in specific amounts, by the milligram.

“Sounded like the secret recipe to me,” Cherry says. She and Tommy thought the company might like to buy the book from them. “We thought it was their recipe, in the handwriting of their founder, you know, like a collector's item.”

The company sued.

The suit was dropped, after KFC found that five of the ingredients were different from their recipe. They returned the book. Cherry fried up a batch of chicken, using the formula and “it sure tastes familiar.”

She is scheduled to appear Friday on CBS' The Early Show. “They are planning some kind of cook-off with KFC.” Their recipe against the one Cherry found. “All in fun.”

For serious business, Cherry will stick to her own fried-chicken recipe, customer tested over 28 years. She thinks hers is a little spicier than the one she found in the basement. I asked for the recipe.

She says it's a secret.

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Ellsworth wrote:

Cherry found the leather-bound ledger a year and a half ago. “It was in the basement with a bunch of other stuff. He wrote down everything, how much he paid for meals. Wasn't much of a tipper,” Cherry observes. “A quarter, 15 cents.” Inside the book was a list of spices, 11 of them. And in specific amounts, by the milligram.

If you believe this recipe found in the ledger is hand written by the Colonel it brings up a good point. Even if the recipe is not for OR it shows that the Colonel was using milligrams (weight) to measure his spices and not volume. This is interesting to me because I was a firm believer that the recipe would be in volume (TBS & tsp) but I do believe that the ledger was written by the Colonel and so I have to rethink on this subject.
I am leaning heavy that the Colonel used weights in milligrams instead of volume.
Please……Your thoughts……….

There is no doubt that C.S would have measured by "weight", once he started producing his recipe in bulk. It is simply too impractical to measure in volume when one is producing pounds upon pounds of a given seasoning...

However, in his early experimental days (say the 30's and 40's) there can also be little doubt that he would have been using volume measurements, as firstly, digital scales measuring less than 1 gram (for example) simply didn't exist then, and also, it is much more practical - given the relatively small amount's of spice required by his then relatively "small" business - to be measuring using the volume measurements of Tbsp's and Cup's

It's all about practicality and ease depending on ones circumstances, which translates into efficiency, and therefore, the saving of time (both of which are crucial, when one is running a business)

This is my take anyway...