It Takes a Tough Guy to Make a Tender Chicken


  Cooking chicken badly is easy.  (Search for the "Rubber Chicken
Circuit.")

  In large family reunions at my grandmother's, preparations for
barbecuing the chicken started months before, with gathering the wood
out in the trees.  (Yes, you could just pick up wood on the day of the
barbecue.  Wood that had seasoned by lying on the ground.  It wouldn't
make good coals, or any coals at all, really.  You'd end up with
chicken that was half burnt and half raw.)

  So you gathered green wood months/years before, and put it where it
would season properly.  You gathered real wood, instead of buying
charcoal briquets, because it flavored the chicken better.  

  You also chopped the wood into small enough chunks to make coals of
the right size to spread across the bottom of the barbecue and heat all
the food evenly.   You also got up before dawn to light the seasoned
wood and partly cover it so that it would make good coals.  It would
take hours for the wood to burn down to coals, but anything cooked on
them would not taste of lighter fluid.  And you had to watch the wood
so that nothing went wrong.

  The coals would be taken from the open pit where they had been
prepared and put into closeable barbecue pits for the actual cooking.
(Moving lit coals is not something you should undertake lightly.)

  Barbecuing would start about 10:00am, or earlier, to have the food
ready at 1:00pm, or later.  That's how long it took to cook chicken,
etc, to be tender and juicy.  (Just cooking the food that long wasn't
enough, remember.  The coals had to be right so that the food didn't
overcook or undercook.)

  The proper way to barbecue chicken so that it's not rubbery I never
learned properly.  It's probably too long to relate here anyway.