Don't Let Mom Spatchcock the Turkey

Lately, I’ve had the thought that 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 the technique for 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.

​ There is a  cute food blog where the young woman in a small kitchen in Manhattan films herself cooking  while drunk.  That would not be a good idea if you decide to spatchcock the Thanksgiving bird.

 I really enjoy  spatchcocking.  This technique for splaying a fowl came to my attention  on several internet food sites as a speedy method for barbecuing the holiday bird. Several weeks before Thanksgiving I bought a six-pound capon  just to practice.  Unfortunately, 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 bread knife.  It worked, but the sawn backbone was rough along the edges. Also,  I needed a boning knife to cut around the edge of the breast bone, severing it from the rib cage.  I got it right on one side, but the other side  looked like a collapsed lung.

 “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 rubber boots.

Admitting  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  is getting on my nerves.  My family is gone.  My spouse is getting cranky.  I feel like  time is running out.   I need a new hobby.   I’m getting a wee bit peevish.