Lincoln’s Favorite Chicken

Cowboy Kent Rollins is a chuck wagon artist with a line of seasonings and videos. He’s given to adaptation of traditional recipes to easier substitutions for contemporary audiences— here he offers boneless, skinless chicken thighs as a substitute for starting with a whole (live?) chicken. If you keep chickens like we do, skinning them out is easier than plucking them and deboning them is not hard nor with practice slow. If not, use the substitution. 

Now at one point you might think he says that this dish is made with margarine, but he really says "marjoram," the herb. Margarine is demonstrably ahistorical. Margarine wasn’t invented until 1869, in a French competition to try and find a low price substitute for butter for the army and lower classes. Don’t use the stuff here or at all. I find that birds won’t eat it if you put it out like you would suet, and the internet says it's not good for them because it lacks the kinds of fat they need even if you can get them to eat it. I would suggest never using it, but definitely not in a historical recipe. 

Otherwise I think you might like this. There's an alternative recipe here which is similar and likewise does include the butter, and that one cites its source in case you're wondering about the historical basis of all this. Cowboy Kent is not bad in spite of these occasional lapses; he does sometimes bury a cast iron Dutch oven in the ground in the old way. Some concessions probably make it easier for contemporary audiences to actually get around to trying these things out, too.