In my British food magazines, I’ve often seen the word “spatchcock.” Clearly it means something akin to butterflying a bird, but somehow different. Spatchcock used in the UK is a verb, an adjective and sometimes a noun. nakedwhiz.com has done sizeable research into the origin of the word, spatchcock. Quoting Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, “Spatchcock, a culinary term, met in cookery books of the 18th and 19th centuries, and revived towards the end of the 20th century, which is said to be of Irish origin. The theory is that the word is an abbreviation of ‘dispatch cock’, a phrase used to indicate a summary way of gilling a bird after splitting it open down the back and spreading the two halves out flat.”

Interestingly enough, The Washington Post covered this subject and, quoting Anne Willan, founder of the French cooking school La Varenne, there is a difference:

“To butterfly is to cut a single slit more or less through the middle of a usually boneless piece of meat, poultry, fish, even a vegetable, so it can be opened up in the manner of butterfly wings,” she says. “It may be cooked flat or stuffed and reshaped. To spatchcock is much more specific, applied only to poultry as far as I know, and almost always to small birds — quail, pigeon, small chickens.”

Filed Under: Culinary History, Food Talk