I would guess a lot of GQers eat chickens, all of which, barring some teratological mishap, have a wishbone, which the big W tells me is the fusion of its two clavicles.
Everybody knows the game where you and a brother, sister, etc., grab one end of the little fork, and try to snap it off. Whoever gets the bigger piece wins.
I usually won by quickly degreasing my side for better traction, or, far more effective, by casually choking up on the bone. (For non-baseball players, choking up is when you grip the bat unusually far towards the fat end.) But I digress.
Do people play wishbone outside the US? What are the names? (Wiki gives some local US variants.)
Yours, idly resting after some chicken cutlets (No bones! Whee!),
Leo
Huh, I’ve always associated the wishbone with turkeys, not chickens. All birds have them, but chicken is usually served in pieces, with the wishbone already broken when you get it.
Where I grew up it’s not a game as such, but your wish is granted if you have the bigger piece. Theoretically. By an unspecified and unreliable higher power.
When and where I grew up, your wish was supposed to come true if you got the bigger piece, the one with the knob on top. Just exactly who or what was supposed to grant this wish, and in what time frame, was never specified.
And I will be making a pot roast chicken tomorrow, from a whole bird. I doubt that my husband and I will play the wishbone game, though. The cats will wish for chicken, and their wish will be granted by my husband.
Wikipedia doesn’t just give US variants. Merrythought, for example, is an English word.
And as Wikipedia notes, the custom goes back thousands of years. It wasn’t invented in the US. So of course people engage in the custom outside the US.
German here, never played it and never heard of it other than in an American context. But that’s just one personal data point, maybe it’s common in some other regions in Germany.
French here, and we did play it at my house when I was a kid, though if the bone had a special name I’ve forgotten it since.
Like **GuanoLad **said however, it was not really a game, more of a bona fide way to get wishes to come true. Somehow. Double blind studies were not ran at our house to assess the validity of the premise.
California.
The wish of the one who got the larger piece would come true.
It couldn’t be done with a fresh wishbone, the bone had to dry out on the windowsill for a day or so first.
Back when I was a kid, roast chicken was regarded as a ‘special event’ dish…if you were rich you’d have it for a Sunday roast, but for the rest of us it was a birthday or Christmas meal. And yes, you’d have to leave the wishbone, not just for a day or two, but until the NEXT special occasion, whereupon the kids in the family would have dibs on cracking the wishbone!
Nowadays of course, lamb is for the upper-crust, and chicken is an everyday meal. Oh how the times, they are a’changing.
When I was a kid growing up in England we did this when we had Sunday roast chicken. It wasn’t called anything specific.
Our variants: when we did it it was after the meal. The wishbone would be taken to the kitchen, washed and dried, then brought back to the table. The participants had to pull it only with their little fingers. No other fingers allowed, and the only way to do this was to hook your little finger all the way round the bone as hard as you could. Made it a lot more challenging.
I’ve seen and done it occasionally in Spain, but never at home or with my paternal family. Never heard a name for it, the people who wanted me to do it just grabbed the bone from one end, offered me the other end and said “make a wish”. Whomever got the piece with the knob “won”.
In the UK you pull the wishbone, by holding the ‘leg’ of the wishbone with the pinkie finger of the hand you don’t write with. Both parties shut their eyes and pull, whomever get the larger part gets to make a wish.
My mother would do the wishbone thing with me when I was kid, and she would almost always win. She explained to me years later that she figured out that hte person who pulls harder is usually going to lose, so she would just hold the wishbone and wait for eager little me to pull. :mad::smack:
Did this my whole life growing up and my mother taught me that if you don’t pull, you win. So now when I do crack the wishbone, I just hold it tight and statically. Haven’t lost since i was a kid.
I was thinking about roast chickens served whole in all their glory.
