This is a great way to quickly cook a whole chicken with the added bonus of getting to say “spatchcock,” one of those wonderful words that sounds pretty dirty without being so at all. The results are quite salubrious, something that I think you’ll take great pleasure in masticating before letting it glide past the uvula.
I’m guessing this preparation has been around since a day or so after our ancestors started putting food on fire. It’s basically butterflying applied to birds. But its giggly new name didn’t come into common use until, per the crack team of RBR Tailgating investigators who remember reading somewhere but can’t recall where, the early 18th Century when it began popping up in cookbooks in Ireland.