Stone Soup
You know, that old story about the itinerant beggar who filled a kettle with water, put a stone in it, and started cooking "stone soup".
I heard this story again on WUNC - my local NPR station - the other day as a lead-in to a review of some cooking books.
Of course, the story continues with everyone in the village contributing something they had been hoarding and there was enough soup for everyone.
I've always thought of this as a sort of trick the beggar played on the village - for their own good - pretending to make soup from a stone. I think that's how most of us see the story. Who would put a stone in soup?
But maybe not...
Salt is one of the primary ingredients in soup. In our culture of plenty - our poorest beggar lives as well as the royalty of the middle ages - salt is a given... but that wasn't always true. You know, Rome grew to an empire initially because they controlled the supply of salt in their region.
What if the beggar's soup stone was actually a salt-containing rock. Were such rocks in common use in the culture which originated that story. The beggar may not have been playing a trick, but instead providing a critical component of the soup.
How did the author of this story see it? Was the moral of the story totally different from the one we see now?
I heard this story again on WUNC - my local NPR station - the other day as a lead-in to a review of some cooking books.
Of course, the story continues with everyone in the village contributing something they had been hoarding and there was enough soup for everyone.
I've always thought of this as a sort of trick the beggar played on the village - for their own good - pretending to make soup from a stone. I think that's how most of us see the story. Who would put a stone in soup?
But maybe not...
Salt is one of the primary ingredients in soup. In our culture of plenty - our poorest beggar lives as well as the royalty of the middle ages - salt is a given... but that wasn't always true. You know, Rome grew to an empire initially because they controlled the supply of salt in their region.
What if the beggar's soup stone was actually a salt-containing rock. Were such rocks in common use in the culture which originated that story. The beggar may not have been playing a trick, but instead providing a critical component of the soup.
How did the author of this story see it? Was the moral of the story totally different from the one we see now?
posted by Doctor Oakroot at
10:59 AM
3 Comments:
One of the items I have hoarded for the coming hard times (or are they already here) is salt. I recently purchased 60+ 2.5# containers of pure salt at 25 cents each. These will be the perfect size for barter, which I also expect to reemerge.
Dear Cigarbox friends, I thought you might be interested to hear that my wife and I used to have a puppet theater in Germany and played the Stone Soup (Steinsuppe) quite often. The story line a little different: a hungry wolf wanted to eat a clever chicken, but it always ends the same, the smarter one wins in the end.
I've included a couple of news clipping from back then, you can see them at: http://picasaweb.google.de/ggborrelli/DerSteinsuppeTheStoneSoup#
Greetings from Bamberg, Germany,
American George
Hey George,
Good to hear from you.
Great pix, but I can't read the German. I haven't heard that version of the story - I'll have to look it up.
Doc
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