I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Over the years, I have delved rather deeply into medieval cookery. I have done so academically, theoretically, and, where possible, practically. The great limitation under which I have suffered is the lack of a truly medieval kitchen. This is why the kitchens at Hampton Court leave me nearly blind with envy, even if they are rather late as medieval goes. Further, having spent most of the last twenty years in a Manhattan apartment, the opportunities for even relatively straightforward open-fire cooking were somewhat limited.

So we fixed parts of that. We purchased a firebox, with a pot-hanger (now to get a suitable pot!), a spit, and spit rests (which are too central and too high, but that's a different topic, and I suspect I can make do with what I've got). Now, what to do? Well, we had guests visiting who like chicken, and we had some excellent chickens from the local farm shop, so the choice of menu seemed obvious.

The perennial problem with chicken is making sure that the meat is cooked all the way through, but not overly dry. This is complicated by the different speeds at which the dark meat portions and the breasts cook, and exacerbated if you are dealing with a cooking method which does not give you relatively exact and constant temperature control. Say, an open fire. One solution is to brine the bird. The hope is that this will keep the breast from drying out while you wait for the legs and thighs to finish cooking.

This is a good solution, and one I recommend.

• a chicken
• brine made with 1/4 cup table salt (or 1/2 cup kosher) per liter of water
• a fire

That's the box there, with all the attachments on it except the grill. I didn't need any of them for this application. Now, make a fire. I favor the teepee method, but use whatever works for you. Charcoal briquettes would be fine, of course. I built it up and tended it with a book on medieval domesticity and a mint julep (or two) for a couple of hours until I had some decent coals. Then slap the bird on the grill.

Now this is important. Put a pot over the top. This means that you are not roasting the chicken. You are baking it, because you've just made a rudimentary oven. That's a good thing, because so often people cooking over fire end up with stuff that's black on the outside and raw in the middle. As they say on Jinsy, that's not good. You could ameliorate this by cutting up the chicken, or even butterflying it. Or you can upturn a pot.

Then keep an eye on it, without drinking too heavily - safety first! - for the next hour or so. Try to avoid flares from the melting fat by poking the fire down and moving the chicken away from leaping flames. Flip it over now and again, and back to front as well. Heck, rotate it 90 degrees, too! The idea, of course, is to try to get each bit of it close to the fire at some point, but not so long that it gets burnt. In that penultimate photo you can see the sort of fire you want - hot coals, but no flames.

After an hour, more or less, the chicken should be done. Let it rest a few minutes and serve. I boiled some new potatoes, drained them, topped them with butter, which melted, then plated them up and poured the melted butter over the potatoes and chicken indiscriminately.