Impaling meat on a green or water-soaked stick and slowly rotating it over or near flames or a bed of aromatic coals has been something humans have done for thousands of years. A year ago, my wife and I toured Sweden, Scotland, and parts of England, visiting historic castles, manor houses, and homes. Of great interest to us was the many varied kitchen layouts designed for cooking with wood, some built in the last hundred or so years, others going back centuries and beyond. The ingenuity of households back then impressed us greatly.
Built-in iron spits or rotisseries on fireplaces or kitchen hearths were at one time common, whether in a country cottage or a more stately residence with cavernous kitchens that prepared meals for many. Households didn’t just throw together a quick meal. As intriguing as these kitchens are to modern cooks, imagine cooking day after day with the constant tending of fires and the labor needed to make sure meals were properly prepared.
As recently as the mid-1800 s, turnspit dogs known as “vernepator curs” were bred and used in England to run on a wheel and turn the spit, and servants or spit boys, often referred to as “spit jacks,” were used to do the same. When I mentioned the spit dogs to my wife, she wondered if they were trained to not take samples. Today, we use electric power to turn our spit, even in camp — if we remember the batteries.
I’ve been fascinated with cooking on a spit for a long time and have experimented with it in camp, starting with two upright forked sticks that supported both ends of a crossbar. That may seem about as basic as you can get, but actually, it’s not. You can use a rock, boulder, log, or tree trunk to elevate one end of a longer spit and lay the other on the ground. Survivalist YouTube videos show ingenious ways to accomplish the same thing, including supporting spit ends with wire, steel cable, twine, rope, or rawhide and supporting the uprights with piled stones. I’ve found that larger cuts or smaller whole animals, for the most part, take no longer to cook when on a spit than when cooked with standard grilling techniques.
A few years ago, I found a 36-inchwide adjustable iron spit on the Internet. It broke down nicely and came with an expanded metal grill, adjustable positions, and four-pronged spit forks for holding the meat. Do a Google search and see what is commercially available.
There are obvious advantages to cooking on a spit, the most noticeable being versatility, uniform doneness, and succulence coming from self-basting with the meat’s rendered fat, which adds flavor. You don’t need as much spice rub or basting liquid as with other methods. Unable to find my favorite organic Smart Chicken in the grocery store (see “Camp Fare: Chicken,” California Fly Fisher, July/August 2019), I substituted a plump farm pheasant, watched it closely, pulled it off the spit at 155 degrees Fahrenheit, and after resting it for 15 minutes under a foil tent and getting a temperature rise to a safe internal temperature of 165 degrees, found it to be evenly cooked throughout and moist.
I had used the “beer can” method of vertical roasting a chicken a few days earlier, replacing the beer with white wine. Cooking evenness and moisture couldn’t compare with my spit-roasted bird. A stainless steel spit conducts heat through the middle of your meat, speeding cooking times, and it makes cleanup fairly simple, certainly better than with a roasting pan in an oven. Add an inert aluminum foil drip pan, and things get even easier. Touch the rod, and you will understand quickly how much heat is conducted, even if you grabbed it as far away as possible from the meat.
The first time I saw a large animal being cooked on a spit was at a Fourth of July Jubilee held on the shores of Hoards Creek Reservoir a few miles out of Coleman, Texas. A traveling caterer contracted to provide a crew, a whole ox, and the custom-built spit to cook it. To this day, I remember the tantalizing smells that drifted from the fire pit toward our shaded picnic spot next to the lake. A pit crew set up and started early the day before, digging a trench for a hardwood wood fire that burned down to coals, and two crew members cooked all night with the help of a good supply of Pearl beer. Along the way, they basted the slowly rotating fourteen-hundred-pound ox with a secret marinade applied with floor mops dipped from huge buckets.
About then I was making the perilous turn from being a picky eater to a late preteen with a ravenous appetite. Those carved, wood-smoked, crusty, caramelized slabs were so good that I asked Aunt Mable, my surrogate grandmother, if I could go back for a second serving . . . paying for it with my own money, of course. We hadn’t been cooking oxen on a spit at Boy Scout outings in San Leandro! That scene, with all the trappings of a Fourth of July celebration — fabulous homemade food, patriotic music, bluegrass ramblings, white-suited political oratory, and milling folks craving good food and socializing because many lived far from town off the grid — sticks in my mind. Half of Coleman County must have been there.
Jump quite a few years forward, and a tradition started on Livermore Fly Fishermen outings, built around a yearly bass fly-rod tournament, included a dinner the night before our big final steak barbeque for those who helped put the event together. A new member, who came from a region in rural Nebraska where such gatherings were common, set up his spit and took an afternoon to cook a 25-pound turkey, spit-roasted drumsticks being the prize.
We have carried this fun idea forward in the Gold Country Fly Fishers by having a f ireside “preparty” where something interesting is cooked outdoors the night before our big tri-tip barbeque and potluck on the last night of our Davis Lake June outing chasing the damselfly nymph migration. We meet again at a smaller Frenchman Lake gathering in the fall, always with some guitar pickings as the fire burns down. I mentioned a leg of lamb suspended on a chain from an iron cooking triangle in the May/June 2020 Foraging Angler column. Other memorable meals have included goat on the chain. We bring the spit for an entire beef loin, a 14-pound pork loin wrapped with prosciutto, and we cook rabbit marinated in and basted with a vinegar-based Basque marinade on a grill suspended by the triangle chain over coals.
Foods that work well on a rotisserie include rabbit, pork loin, bundled and tied pork tenderloin, duck, quail, game hens, chicken, pheasant, turkey, bone-in leg of lamb, boneless leg of lamb, rib-eye roasts, beef loin, hams, whole fish in a basket attachment, domestic and wild game, and suckling pigs. Let your ingenuity and imagination run wild. It’s nice to have a solid relationship with a good butcher who understands what you are trying to do. Trim from a less expensive roast can go in a stew, and roasting the core on a spit will raise the quality level immeasurably.
Choose firewood carefully. Resinous woods such as pine, redwood, or cedar will taint your meat with bitterness. Traditional choices include pecan, various oaks, hickory, maple, alder, and mesquite. If cooking with gas, wood chips in a stainless perforated smoke box can do the job. As with spices, don’t overdo it. You want to complement, not mask the innate flavors that come from the meat and the meat’s own fat. We have found that beef and oak smoke are a particularly good marriage. If you have an educated palate, there are subtle differences in oak smoke flavor, depending on the species of oak.
An interesting recipe for a whole or boneless rolled and tied leg of lamb, using spices and flavorings as in South Africa, was popularized by Planet Barbecue! chef Steve Raichlen. It has been modified by many chefs. I use less sugar, dilute it with white wine, and favor a boneless leg, in part because of cost and because it is easier to use just a portion for smaller groups. Olive oil, garlic, oregano, rosemary, and lemon juice are traditional Greek flavorings that complement roasted lamb, but it’s nice to try new flavors. I suspect the Cape Town lamb recipe is a combination of indigenous and Afrikaner ingredients, which means Dutch and Indonesian tastes, as well. Grilling has been around Africa for a long time. The following recipe evolved for their braii or grilled style of cooking.
Cape Town Grilled Lamb
Whole leg of lamb or rolled and tied boneless leg of lamb.
6 cloves slivered garlic
6 slivers fresh ginger
Marinade:
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
¼ cup soy
¼ cup brown sugar
3 Tbsp lemon juice, plus white wine if you want to thin the marinade a bit
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard (Grey Poupon is a good choice)
2 Tbsp hot Chinese style or 1 Tbsp dry mustard
3 Tbsp vegetable oil (olive oil can be substituted)
3 cloves minced garlic 1 Tbsp minced ginger
Salt and freshly ground black pepper Foil drip pan
The garlic slivers go into inch-deep slits in the lamb. Combine the remaining marinade ingredients and simmer for three minutes until syrupy, stir, and adjust the salt and pepper. Spread some of the marinade on the lamb and refrigerate in a large plastic bag for two to eight hours. Refrigerate the remaining marinade and use it as a glaze, lightly brushing the roast three or four times during the last 30 minutes on the spit. Unused marinade, if untouched by the meat, can serve as a tasty dipping sauce to accompany the meal. Consider doubling the recipe if using large cuts. We halve the brown sugar and thin the lemon juice with white wine.
If you’re using coals, sweep them to either side of the spit line and place an aluminum foil drip pan beneath the spit. That’s not a bad idea if you are using a gas grill, either. Fingerling, small red, or wedged russet potatoes cooked simultaneously in the drip pan are fabulous, particularly if dusted with herbs de Provence and garlic salt and rolled in the drippings while they cook.
Test lamb doneness with an instant-read digital thermometer. The innate flavors of moist, medium-rare lamb complement the spices and vise versa. Pull your succulent roast off the spit at an internal temperature of 125 degrees Fahrenheit and rest it under foil for 20 minutes, allowing the flavorful juices to pull back. Outside weather, particularly ambient temperature, humidity, and wind will affect cooking times.
This dish pairs very nicely with couscous, quinoa, or barley salads and a pinot noir, Argentine malbec, or lower-alcohol zinfandel.
Cooking with Fire
Useful cookbooks for grilling include Francis Mallmann’s Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, Michael Chiarello’s Live Fire: 125 Recipes for Cooking Outdoors, and Steven Raichlen’s Planet Barbecue! In Charred and Scruffed, Adam Perry Lang takes a bold, yet ancient and rustic approach to grilling.
— Trent Robert Pridemore
