It is described in a recipe for grilled chicken in the very explicit Le
Livre de Cuisine de Madame E. Sant-Ange, recently published in English
translation by Paul Aratow. This is Julia's model cookbook, and one of her
favorites, so the transmission could be direct. Sant-Ange published in the
late 1920s, but was quite old so the dish could be a lot older. She
describes it as a variant for a very young, plump chicken, of a recipe for
squab in the shape of a toad (you fold the wings and drumsticks in to make
it flatter).

The other trail leads via chicken-under-a-brick, which is a typical dish of
Georgia, the Caucasian Georgia. That takes us back to those grill-everything
nomads of central Asia...


--
-Mark H. Zanger
author, The American History Cookbook, The American Ethnic Cookbook for
Students
www.ethnicook.com
www.historycook.com


"Opinicus" > wrote in message
...
> http://www.virtualweberbullet.com/butterflychicken.html
>
> This is one of those "Now why didn't I think of that?" things. I love
> roast chicken but the Julia Child method of hovering over the bird like
> some guardian angel never appealed to me.
>
> Butterflying turns the bird into a more or less two-dimensional mass whose
> cooking is easy to manage. This method didn't exist 50-30 years ago so far
> as I can tell.
>
> Who invented it and when in the last two decades?
>
> --
> Bob
> http://www.kanyak.com
>