Published on Show Me Mizzou Aug. 28, 2026
Story by Jessica Vaughn Martin, BJ ’15
Photos by Abbie Lankitus
On a small table inside the Novak Leadership Institute rests a relic of America’s early fast-food history: one of Harland D. Sanders’ original pressure cookers. It’s unassuming. You might walk right by the steel pot and think someone here takes lunch very seriously. The founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, better known as Colonel Sanders, used it to fry some of the earliest batches of his specialty and helped set the franchise on a course for global domination.
David Novak, BJ ’74, the institute’s namesake, gifted the artifact as he was clearing out his office after retiring as CEO of Yum! Brands, which owns fast food chains including KFC, Habit Burger & Grill and Taco Bell. “We don’t have a forensic team to track the exact provenance of this pot,” Novak Institute Executive Director Margaret Duffy says with a smile, “but we know that Colonel Sanders and his restaurants used this pot in the original KFC cooking process.”
It makes perfect sense that a pressure cooker would end up in Novak’s possession: He and Sanders are both considered trailblazers, and the Novak Leadership Institute was founded on educating kindred spirits for generations to come. (David and Wendy Novak also support the current first-floor renovations in Jesse Hall.)
Without Sanders’ unconventional approach, KFC might never have been fast. In the 1930s, he was a fried chicken aficionado operating the Sanders Café in Corbin, Ky. He was convinced that cast iron skillets made the best version. “The colonel believed that deep frying ruined chicken,” Duffy says.
Still, the fast-food wars were on, and the hamburglers were winning. “In the ’30s and ’40s, there was a huge automobile culture growing, and people wanted fast food,” Duffy says. But made-to-order fried chicken was difficult to cook quickly. Then the colonel had an epiphany: He would transform a pressure cooker into a pressure fryer.
At the time, pressure cooking was largely reserved for steaming vegetables, and the process was intimidating. But Sanders mastered the technique. Pairing it with his spice blend, he found a way to cook faster without sacrificing moisture or crispiness.
In other words, leadership of the highest order, made to order.
