Throwback Thursday: The curious case of the spatchcock fowl

Hatch, match and dispatch could be thought of as a handy term for trivialising a human life, or reminding us of how mortal we are and how suddenly life can be taken away. It has long been the informal description, in world newsrooms, of the births, marriages and deaths classified advertisements in newspapers. Hatch, match and dispatch…

In cooking, the bird that is hatched will one day be dispatched, in a different way, and by human hand. 

The Oxford Companion to Food keeps things simple: “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 grilling a bird after splitting it open down the back and spreading the two halves out flat.” 

Not everyone agrees. Wikipedia gives it no shrift at all, relegating it to its “butterflying” page as an afterthought. 

Etymonline.com offers: spatch-cock, a colloquial term in cookery, by 1785 (Grose), denoting a method of grilling a game bird after splitting it open along the spine and laying it flat; a word of obscure origin. “Orig. in Irish use, later chiefly Anglo-Indian” [OED]. Said in Grose to be in reference to a fowl broiled immediately after killing”.

And, with reference to the 18th century lexicographer Francis Grose, suddenly there’s a slim South African connection. Worldwidewords.org, replying to a reader’s question, writes: “What is also mysterious is how the culinary term came to refer to a forced or inappropriate insertion. The oldest case I can find is one also mentioned by Eric Partridge. It was in The Times of 11 October 1901, reporting a speech by Sir Redvers Buller about an incident in the South African War: “I therefore spatchcocked into the middle of that telegram a sentence in which I suggested it would be necessary to surrender.” Partridge says it was originally military jargon. In 1910, in A Handbook of the Boer War, Wyndham Tufnell added a footnote to his report of Buller’s speech: “He probably meant ‘sandwiched’”. He might have done, but he may instead have been thinking of doing something quickly or in haste, perhaps linked with the fact that the telegram was indeed a dispatch (in the sense of a report) and so linking it to dispatch cock. We just don’t know.”

Merriam-Webster suggests that it is “probably [an] alternation of spitchcock”. Wiktionary concurs: “A variant of spitchcock, (“eel split lengthwise and broiled”), from Middle English spiche-coke”, adding that the further etymology of spatchcock is “uncertain”. It does suggest possible origins, however: 

• that it could derive from the Middle English speche or spiche plus cock, meaning collectively “to allow something to cook”;


• that it may derive from spik (“animal fat, especially lard”) [i.e. spek or speck], spik/ spike (large nail; pointed stud), or spit, spite (rod for cooking meat, spit; pointed object), plus cok (male of the common domestic fowl, rooster”.

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