A spatch cock is a chicken served for dinner after skinning it, splitting it in two, and roasting it on a grill. The name of this Irish dish was originally dispatch cock, so named because it was easily dispatched: in fact, because it could be prepared with such ease and speed, the spatch cock became the usual dish to serve guests who dropped by with little warning. The name spatch cock emerged in English in the late eighteenth century, but—strangely—there are references three hundred years earlier to another dish called spitchcock. It does not seem possible that the name spatch cock could have derived from this earlier spitchcock because the a in spatch is part of the original dispatch; as well, the ingredients of the two dishes have nothing in common: far from being a grilled cock, spitchcock was a dish of fried eels dressed with bread crumbs and herbs. Accordingly, the real mystery, as yet unsolved, is how a dish of eels acquired the name spitchcock.