It’s brought families to the table since its invention at a Kentucky Fried Chicken store in 1957, when not-so-nice-guy Colonel Sanders asked Salt Lake City franchisee Pete Harmon if he wanted to buy 500 paper buckets another store had purchased from a traveling salesman. In the cavernous fried chicken genre, KFC’s bucket looms large. “Apparently, one of the former employees here back in the ’60s took the idea with him to KFC, and they started using it. “We had the bucket of chicken out there since before KFC had it,” owner Teri Ernst told Eater LA in 2013.
Dinah’s Family Restaurant, also in Los Angeles, claims that the cement bucket sign shooting up from its roof predates the signs propped above most KFC locations. The bucket’s aesthetic appeal has made it a beacon of sorts: In Los Angeles’s Koreatown, a KFC building at the corner of Oakwood and Western is, itself, the shape of a bucket, a giant beige barrel that eclipses every other building on the street. Measured by its capacity for chicken (10-piece, 12-piece, 16-piece, or more), most sizes can fit in the crook of an arm, balance on a lap, or be placed onto or below a front passenger seat. The bucket is interchangeable for at-home, outdoor, or in-car eating.
The bucket’s chameleon skin can be altered with the branding of any bird-slinging business but always portrays one unequivocal message: Hot fried chicken in here.įor what’s essentially a molded strip of grease-resistant paper, the bucket is actually remarkable - a marvel, even, of modern engineering, its form intrinsically functional and elegant. Consider the bucket’s design: the cylindrical shape, the waxy exterior, the white paper top with four small half-moon openings - there, ostensibly, to let air and moisture escape and keep the chicken as close to its post-fryer crispness as possible.
Save the flat cardboard plane of a pizza box or the Chinese American oyster pail, perhaps no meal in America is as recognizable by its physical vessel as the fried chicken bucket. It was also familiar, a modicum of casual comfort as the omicron wave crested in Los Angeles. It was a meal that could feed a family of 10 for less than $125. This sack of abundance held three whole buckets brimming with fried chicken (two extra-crispy, one original recipe), a smorgasbord of sides, and steam-creased boxes of those dense, almost cakey, buttermilk biscuits.
The cashier was nice, which made the experience even better, as did the instant satisfaction of tucking away a very large, very warm, very full plastic bag on the floor of my front seat. The day of, it felt strangely good to pull up to a West Los Angeles KFC and wait in a short drive-thru line, anticipation heightening with every tire-inch forward.