Perhaps you (like I) enjoy touring restored colonial era kitchens. Probably the docent has pointed out the “Tin Kitchen” in front of the fireplace (usually this is about when she mentions that “the single biggest cause of death of women at this time was catching their petticoats on fire”). The Tin Kitchen is a smallish reflector oven…a metal box, featuring a spit, which can be rotated one notch at a time to allow fireplace roasting.
Anyway… I found someone who makes them for reenactment groups, and dropped enough shameless hints among family members so that I finally got one for my birthday.
But of course… there are no real recipes or instructions - this was a kitchen device that required actual hands on experience to learn how to use it properly. So here, then, is my half-assed first attempt:
The various skewers…
The chicken all prepped for the fire…
The fire prepared…
The chicken is loaded…
And placed before the fire.
I set a timer to ring every 8 minutes so that I can turn it another notch, and I inserted an oven probe so that I would know the interior temperature of the oven. Sounds fool-proof right?
No, it didn’t to me either… but I figured the temp gauge would give me a fighting chance.
Here is the probe, registering the temperature at the BACK of the oven…
And voila… an hour and a half later… dinner is burned to perfection!
But at least my petticoats didn’t catch fire.
2nd attempt: I got it right this time!
Crispy skin,… juicy meat (even the white meat)… perfect! I kept the back of the reflector oven down around 250 degrees but cooked it for roughly the same amount of time. Apparently adjusting the kitchen’s proximity to the fire, even by an inch, makes big changes in the oven temperature. You can also adjust by adding wood (which cools the temperature – at least until the new wood is fully ignited).
Of course, I was still using both oven AND meat thermometers, so it was still a bit of a cheat.
Chris
