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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

Axe head soup strikes again

I've always heard it as Stone Soup, but I presume it's the same thing.

I know it as Stone Porridge. These stories probably share an origin. https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type1548.html is sitting in my browser bookmarks, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup has some variations not listed on that page.

In Sweden it is "Koka soppa på en spik". "Make soup with a (iron) nail".

We also eat nettle soup with a boiled egg-half. I would not call it bland, it is just a dish that does not scream with its loudest voice in your face.

I'd also like to add that I'd consider it a delicacy. Because it is pretty much the first vegetable that you can harvest in spring. And you don't have to have a garden, you can just go out and pick it from anywhere.

One of my all-time favorite stories.

My dear mother told me this story when I was just a boy. I was enchanted by the idea of this magical stone, too young to consider the clever trick the tramp was playing on the woman.

The sense of cooking being a magical endeavor has stayed with me ever since.

It wasn't a trick, the magic stone was a big salt rock. It was the most important ingredient from a flavor standpoint.

Hah I misinterpreted it a different way as a kid, for a long time I thought it was like a collective delusion where the shared experience of contributing insubstantial garnishes to a pot of water tricked everyone into finding it filling and enjoying it.

While that was the way it was taught to me as a kid, I thought it was more of a story about con men who came to a village and tricked the townsfolk to eat their entire winter rations in a grand feast and then skipped town before anyone realized what they did.

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