. . over a fire. They don't work well on stoves because stove burners make the hottest part a ring well out from the center - the hotest part is supposed to be in the middle. You can't get that on a stove burner.

Woks are supposed to go on a clay "stove" with a hole on the top and a fire inside. I'm sure they work very well indeed with that kind of heating. I have some of the best woks ever made, but I'm still not impressed with how they work on gass burners.

They have a single heating element ring about 1/3 up the side. This allows the oil in the bottom to remain wonderfully cold while anything that sticks to the sides gets burned.

We always poured some alcohol in a small dish, lit it and rotated the chicken over it.

These days I'd just use a butane blowtorch like I do to remove cactus needles before slicing and cooking cactus, but back then blowtorches were messy hand pumped things that ran on smelly kerosene. The dumb cluck would probably taste like kerosene no matter how you cooked it.