This kitchen superstition comes from an older belief that accidentally burning beef bones was a sign that a great deal of sorrow was coming your way as a result of poverty. The precise origin of the belief is hard to pinpoint accurately but it may stem from the story of St Lawrence, one of the most honoured martyrs of the Roman Church, whose role was to care for the poor and needy. In the year 258 he was told by the Prefect of Rome, who believed the Church had a hidden fortune, to hand over the treasures of that institution. The saint said he would need three days to gather the treasures but instead of bringing gold, he brought all the destitute people of Rome who were being helped by the Church. In his anger the Prefect of Rome ordered that St Lawrence be put to a slow and painful death: he was tied to a grill and slowly burned alive.
An interesting variation of the superstition appears in one of the earliest collections of women’s wisdom, the Distaff Gospels, published in 1507, and this version provides the link to St Lawrence: ‘He that dothe not caste, or suffreth not to caste bones in the fyre shall not haue the toothache for ye honour of saynt Laurens.’
The superstition doesn’t appear in print in its modern form until 1840, when it was included in Mother Bunch’s Golden Fortune Teller, described as an oracle of love, marriage and fate. Mother Bunch adds that ‘To burn fish or poultry bones indicates that scandal will be spread about you, and to cast those of pork or veal into the fire inflicts pains in the bones of the person so improvident.’
In addition to honouring the memory of St Lawrence, the everyday homemakers of the medieval and Renaissance periods would have seen burning the bones as unlucky in itself. Most families kept one or two cows at a time and, when slaughtered, the whole of the animal was put to use – the bones were often used for making household utensils like tools, weapons, fasteners and sewing implements.
The Roman poet Virgil helped to link the bat to a sense of evil by identifying it with the monstrous winged creatures described in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. In the first century AD, charms carved from the bones of bats were used to repel evil, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder recommended fixing the body of a bat upsidedown above a door to ward off misfortune.
In medieval Europe, on the other hand, it was considered bad luck to see a bat in daylight and if one flew into your house it meant a death would soon follow. The animals’ nocturnal habits meant that they were considered ‘creatures of the night’ and thought to associate with witches and the Devil. Some peasants believed that a bat had the power to bewitch you if you got too close and many medieval artistic representations of the Devil depict him with bats’ wings. In an age when people believed that God was in a constant state of war with the Devil for their souls, it wasn’t unusual for demonic possession to be suspected if someone began to behave strangely. There was no understanding of conditions such as epilepsy or psychosis, and the medieval interpretation of the symptoms of these problems was that the Devil himself had taken over the soul of the sufferer, or that a demon in the form of an animal like a bat had been sent into the body by a witch.
In the eighteenth century, when novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula brought the folkloric figure of the vampire to the forefront of public consciousness, public opinion turned against bats even more. While Europeans did everything they could to prevent bats from coming close to them, in China and the Middle East they were welcome visitors. Mythology from both cultures feature bats as symbols of happiness and long-life. Only since hard-fought campaigns by environmentalists has the ecological importance of bats been recognized in the West and they are now a legally protected species.