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Chickens for Lunch
Split a young chicken down the back, wash and wipe dry, sason with salt and pepper. Put in a dripping-pan, and place in a moderate oven; bake three-quarters of an hour. This is much better for traveling lunch than when seasoned with butter. - Mrs. W. B. Brown, Washington, D. C.
A spatchcocked roast chicken with nothing on it but salt and pepper, meant to be eaten cold out of a basket. The whole point is the absence of butter, which is what keeps the surface dry rather than greasy once it cools.
- "Moderate oven"350F. In a wood-range kitchen this was the middle of the range's working heat, held by feel; a modern thermostat gets you there without guesswork.
- Split down the backThis is spatchcocking. Cut along either side of the backbone with shears, remove it, and press the bird flat so it lies open in the pan and cooks evenly through the thigh.
- What "young chicken" meantA broiler of roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb, considerably smaller than a supermarket bird. A 4 lb chicken flattened will want closer to an hour, and the 45 minutes given here will leave it underdone.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockThe thickest part of the thigh should read 165F. Cold chicken is eaten without the reassurance of steam, so there is no room for an optimistic guess.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed pan, not a deep casserole. Anything with high sides traps steam and softens the skin, which defeats the purpose of a lunch chicken.
- Why no butterButter-basted skin sets waxy and dull at room temperature and leaves grease on the wrapping. Dry-roasted skin stays crisper and the meat carves cleanly cold.
- Carrying itCool it uncovered until it stops steaming, then wrap and refrigerate. If it is genuinely travelling, pack it cold with an ice source; the two-hour limit at ambient temperature applies to cooked poultry as much as to anything.
- YieldOne small bird serves two generously as a cold lunch, or four as part of a spread with bread and pickles.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) belongs to the era when a long journey meant a hamper rather than a dining car, and cold chicken was a common centre of it: portable, eaten with the fingers, and forgiving of a few hours in a basket. Mrs. Brown's contribution is really a note on technique rather than a dish, and it turns on a distinction that mattered more before refrigeration than it does now, though the recipe says only that the bird is "much better" without butter and gives no reason. Splitting a bird flat down the back for quick, even cooking is old and unremarkable in nineteenth-century American cookbooks; the term spatchcock, generally traced to Irish and English usage well before this book, is not used here at all. The signed attribution is typical of the volume, which was assembled from contributions by named housekeepers across Ohio and beyond and reads as a compiled community record as much as a manual.