Stone Soup

This came up in yesterday’s unbelievably wonderful discussion of fictional foods, and, for the record, when I was in second grade, my friend Lyn and I actually did make stone soup with her mom. Which sounds like one of those perfect kid-friendly activities, and totally adorable and literary, except her mom, love her, blanked on the idea of a single, washed stone, and instead tossed in (this is not a joke) a handful of hastily-rinsed gravel from their driveway.

So, instead of a weird, milky hot-ham-water with some wilted vegetables (which is what a strict constructionist reading of the original story results in), we got the aforementioned liquid with…gravel. Most, but not all of which, settled to the bottom.

Lyn and I took a few sad spoonfuls, and were super happy to chalk the whole thing up to “fairytales are bullshit,” and then we merrily asked her mom what was for dinner, and if she had just said “pizza, it looks like!” we would have cheered and it would have been totally The Wonder Years.

But, instead, her mom looked at us, grimly, and said: “stone soup”.

We choked it down by pretending to be Pyornkrachzark from The Neverending Story, whose rock-based diet somehow didn’t make it on yesterday’s list.

It’s probably still a fun rainy-day activity for your kids, just…one rock. Washed. One large rock. Okay?