Spatchcock the Turkey
Lately, I’ve had the thought I could have been a butcher. I wonder why you don’t see many women butchers. Is it a union thing? I’ll have to ask one of the guys at the grocery store in town. I need to learn their names. Any French housewife or gourmet cook gets to know her local butcher and I don’t mean in the biblical sense.
I like deboning. I deboned some chicken legs and thighs not too long ago. I like the precision, the clean feel of chicken flesh, and turning an inexpensive cut of meat into tidy bundles for stuffing. Farce, I think it’s called. I felt like Julia Child. She could talk and cut up a chicken at the same time, on television, as a matter of fact.
What I really enjoy is spatchcocking. I bought a six pound capon the other day just to practice. I didn’t have the right tools. I needed a sharp clever and a mallet to make strong whacks through the backbone. Instead, I resorted to vigorous sawing with my serrated breadknife. It worked, but the sawn backbone was rough along the edges. Also, I needed a boning knife to cut close to the breast bone, severing it from the rib cage. I got it right on one side but the other looked like a collapsed lung.
This technique for splaying a fowl came to my attention before Thanksgiving, mentioned on several internet food sites as a speedy method for barbequing the holiday bird. “Spatchcock” is an Irish term that means “dispatch the cock.” I can see some medieval Irish housewife standing in the barnyard, declaring that the mean old bastard has to go, referring to an irascible rooster who outlived his usefulness. “Dispatch the cock!” she declaimed with her arm raised. I wonder if her husband shuddered in his boots.
In fact, this Thanksgiving we roasted a traditional stuffed bird for a dinner of fourteen family members and then spatchcocked a twelve pound turkey on the barbeque for turkey sandwiches the next day. My husband got do the spatchcocking. He didn’t do a very good job. He didn’t remove the breastbone, so the turkey huddled over the grill, rather than embracing it. However, it browned nicely, cooked in less than two hours, tasted great.
That I should admit how much I enjoyed spatchcocking a capon just for practice might make me seem like a figment of Stephen King’s imagination. The truth is that being a housewife these days is getting on my nerves. My family is gone, grown. My spouse has become cranky and critical. I feel like my time is running out, and I’m getting a wee bit peevish.
