Home › Girlish Grub › Chicken on a Spit
Chicken on a Spit
The girls at Camp Tuckabatchee, Saginaw, Michigan, have perfected the cooking of chicken on a spit until it is a fine camp art. They believe that the fire plays the most important role in this cooking drama, so they give it a good deal of attention, and advise as follows:
First choose your cooking spot, a circle about fifteen feet in diameter in a clearing near a good supply of fuel. In the circle build a good big reflector fire that has about five logs twenty inches long and five inches in diameter. This may be improved by making it double. Use green wood if possible, but if the wood is dry, it is best to have some water near by to use in case your reflector catches fire. If you build the reflector one day and use it the next, the wind may have changed so that it is not effective. The wind sometimes changes even while you are cooking, and you may have to build a wing that catches the wind and gives you the advantage. The reflector may of course be built of stone.
Next, get two forked sticks, strong and of green wood, to use as supports for the cross-stick on which your chicken turns. For the spit, a green stick about an inch thick is best-witch hazel if you can find it. Set the supporting sticks about four or five feet apart and a foot and a half from the reflector. Build the fire between the supports and the reflector-not too close to the supports, because a pan must be placed underneath the chicken to catch the drippings. After you have your device ready, get the firewood. You need lots of wood-big pieces of hard wood that will hold fire and give off heat for a long time are best. You cannot use a great deal of small wood without burning the chicken. A log cabin fire is a good kind to use. As soon as possible you should put the big wood on and use that the rest of the time.
A four pound chicken takes about four hours to cook. Examine the interior of the chicken to see that it is clean, wash it with cold water, then season well inside and out with salt and pepper, and use this dressing recipe: half a loaf of bread, cut into small pieces and mixed thoroughly with a chopped onion, an egg, half a teaspoonful of salt, pepper, sage if desired. Put a lump of butter the size of an egg on top, and pour a cup and a half of boiling water over it, allowing the dressing to steam.
When the dressing is made, take the green limb which you have chosen for the spit, and put it through the chicken from the tail to the neck, allowing a good length of stick to protrude from the neck. Now stuff the chicken with the dressing, filling the neck well, but don't cram it in-give it room to swell. Then sew the skin around the neck tightly to the stick, and do the same with the other opening so that the dressing will stay in. You can eliminate trouble by fastening the wings to the sides and tying the chicken firmly to the stick so that it won't roll around. The chicken is now ready for broiling.
Put the chicken on the supports, and allow it to cook for four hours. If a squad of girls is working on the spit, have each one take her turn in turning the stick slowly every few minutes. Baste frequently with the drippings from the pan beneath the chicken.
This is a four-hour open-fire roast, and almost all of the skill lies in the fire rather than the bird. A few things in the original need translating, and one needs correcting outright.
- The hinge: heat from the side, never belowThe reflector wall and the log-cabin fire exist to throw steady radiant heat at the bird from one side while the drippings fall into a clean pan. Fat dripping into flame is what chars a spit chicken; keep the coal bed set back and rake it forward as it dies rather than adding small wood.
- Choose the spit wood carefullyThe recipe calls for a green stick about an inch thick, witch hazel if you can find it, though it gives no reason for the preference. Any green hardwood sapling of similar thickness works. Do not use yew, oleander, laurel, or anything resinous, and never a piece of treated or painted lumber.
- Four hours is a guide, not a doneness testUse an instant-read thermometer. The thickest part of the thigh should read 165F and the center of the stuffing must reach 165F as well. A stuffed bird turning in variable wind can easily hit temperature early in the breast and lag badly in the stuffing.
- The stuffing is the risk in this dishBread dressing packed into a raw bird and cooked over an uneven fire is the classic case where the meat finishes long before the center of the stuffing does. Loosely filled, as instructed, is right; if the thigh is done and the stuffing is not, scoop it out and finish it in the drip pan over the coals.
- "A lump of butter the size of an egg"Roughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Half a loaf of bread cut small comes to something like 4 to 5 cups of pieces; a cup and a half of boiling water gives a moist, steamed dressing rather than a dry crumb one.
- Securing the birdTying is not optional. A chicken that slips on the spit will keep rolling back to the same position, heaviest side down, instead of turning with the stick. Truss the wings and legs tight to the body with cotton butcher's twine, then lash the body to the stick at two points so it cannot rotate independently.
- Basting and the drip panUse a metal pan you do not mind blackening, and keep a long-handled spoon or ladle for basting. Every few minutes of turning, as written, is about right; a quarter turn is enough each time.
- YieldA four-pound bird with dressing feeds four to five. If the camp is larger, run two spits rather than one bigger bird -- a larger stuffed bird makes the center much harder to bring up to temperature.
- If you are not in a clearingThe same result comes off a covered kettle grill with a rotisserie, coals banked to one side and a drip pan under the bird; expect well over an hour and a half for a stuffed four-pound bird, and go by temperature rather than time. The fire-building instructions here are the point of the recipe, not a necessity of the dish.
This comes out of the girls' summer camp movement of the early twentieth century, when Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts and independent camps treated outdoor cookery as a graded skill rather than a novelty -- fire-laying, reflector walls and spit work were things a camper could earn credit for. The proportions of the instructions tell you where the difficulty was thought to lie: the fire gets the bulk of the text and the bird and its dressing get the tail end of it. Reflector fires of stacked green logs were a standard camp technique, throwing heat forward at a fixed target instead of letting it rise uselessly into the sky. The frank note that the wind may shift overnight, or mid-cook, and that you may have to build a wing to catch it, is the sort of detail that comes from people who had actually stood there turning the stick.