We didn’t hire a Greek chef when Nick and Natalia’s son Thomas was christened but the man who cooked the piece de resistance – goat on a spit – met with the wholehearted approval of all the Greek uncles and grandparents. Not that they held back on the advice for John Bignell, of which his main take-home message was that it is traditional to drink lots of cherry wine while roasting a goat!

But apart from that, there was little to teach John about spit-roasting a beast. One of his first efforts was a huge 400kg steer for his local Bream Creek Show – they dug a pit in the ground for the fire and gave the beast a 10-hour slow cook.

Since then, John and his nephew Bert Shugg, have performed their spit-roasting double act at many events. (John Bignell of goat-cheese fame is another nephew). John looks after the fire and, he says, “Bert’s right into the flavouring. He has a huge syringe and injects all sorts of things right into the muscle”.

If you’re thinking of spit-roasting lamb for Easter, John says the secret is to have two fires – on right under the rotating spit and another alongside from which to feed the cooking fire.

“Instead of putting wood straight on to the cooking fire, which would flare up, you shovel hot wood coals from the second fire into the fire under the spit,” he says. And you concentrate the fire at the hindquarter and shoulder ends where the meat is thickest and have fewer coals in the middle. Both men are adamant that wood does a better job than any gas burner.

If you are cooking a pig, you get crackling at the end of cooking time by stopping the rotisserie for about a minute, giving a quarter turn, and then stopping again. “If the fire is hot enough, that will get the fat bubbling,” says John – or you can resort to some passes with a blow torch.

Bert’s ideas for flavouring are not restricted to cooking on a grand scale. For oven-baked or barbecued lamb try basting it with a mix of 150ml of olive oil, onion juice from two onions chopped and blended then sieved, a couple of bay leaves chopped finely, and two teaspoons of dried Greek rigani (or substitute oregano) and the sieved pulp of two tomatoes. Or use a mixture of lemon juice, olive oil and garlic.

A Turkish version is to rub the lamb with olive oil, the juice of two onions, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, salt and black pepper. Plain or preserved lemons sewn into the cavity is another idea. If you are cooking outdoors, slap the marinade on with a “broom” of rosemary or oregano branches. Bert is a pediatrician, so has access to a most suitable syringe (normally used for a post-surgical procedure you’d probably rather not know about) that has “a nice hard nozzle”.

Bert’s not the only one to resort to medical equipment for spit roasting. He admires Nikitas Nikitaras’s “amazing” spit fashioned from an old hospital trolley. It incorporates a car jack that raises and lowers the fire to the meat.

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