Bones_ Recipes, History, and Lore - Jennifer McLagan [56]
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BONE GAMES
Although we grew up on opposite sides of the world, my husband and I both played jacks. His Canadian jacks were formed from thin metal strips fused together in the center, so when you tossed them, they landed on the spokes. My jacks would have been familiar to the ancient Greeks and early Romans; they were made from the knucklebones of sheep’s ankles. One source I read while working on this book stated that the tradition of using real knucklebones survived only until the last days of the nineteenth century. Well, I can vouch that it lasted at least until the 1970s in Australia.
Plastic jacks were available, but my mother, ever frugal, boiled up the lower leg bones of sheep to extract the small knucklebones. If you want to try this at home, ask your butcher for lamb metatarsal bones. These are the bones between the hind leg shank and the foot, and they are usually left on the carcass and tied together to suspend it. Then most butchers toss them away with the string still wound around them. They come in pairs, so ask for three pairs, although you will only need five knuckles to play jacks. Mix them with some meatier lamb bones and make stock. Then, once the stock is strained, you can retrieve these leg bones and leave them to cool. Use a small knife, preferably a flexible boning knife, to cut into the ankle joint, where you will find the small knucklebone. (There is a bonus to all this: these metatarsal bones will have added extra gelatin to your stock, making it set like a jelly.) To clean and whiten the knucklebones, soak them in a sodium carbonate cleaner, such as a household carpet cleaner or spot remover.
Knucklebones is a very old game, and its origins are difficult to pin down. It may in fact have been one of the first games ever played. It is easy to imagine early man sitting around the fire and passing his time playing games with leftover bones.
In the British Museum, there is a small terracotta sculpture dating from third century B.C. that depicts two young girls playing with knucklebones. During the classical and Hellenistic periods of Greek art, numerous scenes of young women and goddesses playing this game were sculpted and painted. These girls would have played with either real bones or ones made from ivory, bronze, or terracotta. The game remained popular with children through the ages, as Brueghel’s 1560 painting “Children’s Games” reveals. It illustrates more than two hundred children playing different games, and in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting, you can see young girls playing knucklebones.
Astragali was the Greek name for knucklebones; the Romans called it tali. They both played several versions of the game ranging from a simple tossing and catching game to one that involved gambling. Knucklebones have an elongated S shape. There are four long sides, the front, the back, and the two sides of the S and when tossed, the bone can land on any of them. The other two “sides” are the top and bottom of the S; they don’t come into play, as the bone cannot land on these curved sides. The four long sides were assigned the values 1, 3, 4, and 6, marked by dots or Roman numerals. Four bones were tossed together and a complicated scoring system was used.
All around the world dice games are played using bones. In India, there is one called k’abatain, its name coming from the Arabic word k’ab, meaning ankle bone. Even in English, dice are called bones. Ankle bones were probably the forerunners of the six-sided cubes we use today. A cube is the most practical to toss as all sides have an equal chance of coming up and so it became the most popular shape. The placement of the numbers on the dice varied, but the general convention became that the numbers on opposite faces of the die would total 7.
Other games like draughts, checkers, chess, and dominos all began with bone playing pieces.
Lamb Shanks Cooked in Paper with Guinness
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