One of my New Year’s Resolutions was perhaps a strange one: If there is a moment at which I could either shake someone’s hand, or not, then I should default to shaking their hand. We have all been in such situations, where it could go either way - either a nod of the head or an actual contact. Furthermore, and it might be going a bit far, but if I’m alone and someone else is alone, then let’s try to be less alone, together. Despite the Coronavirus outbreak, I’m opting for contact.
One reason for my resolution is my favourite story in a book of folk tales that I used to read to my small children at bedtime (that ship has now sailed - they are young ladies now and stay up later than me). The story was that of ‘Stone Soup,’ and it’s a story that you may have heard before, in one of its many forms, since it seems to mutate with geography and with time. In ‘my’ version, it goes like this:
A man, down on his luck, approaches a village just as dusk is falling. He knocks on the first door that he comes to, but there is no answer. He tries a few more, but the villagers, suspicious of unknown callers at such a late hour, avoid even opening the door to him. Finally, as the cold starts to bite, an old lady heeds his knock, opening her door just a crack. “What do you want?” the old lady asks, eying him suspiciously. “Good evening, madam,” replies the traveller, aware that his shabby clothes have looked better and that his muddy shoes are in want of a polish. “I wonder if I might beg a little warmth from your hearth, on this cold night?” Despite herself, she welcomes him in, and has him sit by the fire, since she can smell the coming snow in the wind.
After a while, the gentleman asks if the old lady might like to try some of his famous ‘stone soup.’ Intrigued, she asks for the recipe. The man digs into his pocket and brings out a polished stone that does, indeed, smell of a rich soup. “With just this stone, madam, and just a little seasoning, I can concoct a magnificent soup that would be fine enough for a king.” The old lady doesn’t believe him, but his suggestion piques her interest and, besides, she is starting to get hungry herself. “All I need,” he says, “is a big pan of boiling water and some salt and pepper.” She eyes him, and says “Well, you’d better take your coat off if you are going to make a decent job of this ‘stone soup.’”
She put the pan on to boil, fetching rock salt and cracked black pepper from the pantry. Once the pot had boiled, the man plopped the stone into the water, and added a generous pinch of both salt and pepper. “Give it a moment,” he said, “and you shall taste the richest soup of your life.” Doing so, he took a spoonful of the broth, blew on it and tasted it himself. “Ah, madam,” he said, “it is already delicious, but I feel that it lacks a little something. Do you, by any chance, have any carrots that might add yet more flavour to this fine provender?” She happened to have a few old carrots in her store room, which she quickly chopped and added to the pot. “Mmm, madam, it is fit for a princeling, if not yet fit for a king. It will be improved by the addition of just an onion or two. Might you oblige?” She sighed and found three part-shrivelled onions at the bottom of the vegetable basket, chopped them and added them to the carrots. He tasted again, and found it delicious but “lacking just a soupçon of red wine, a few beans or lentils, potatoes and maybe just a teeny bit of meat.”
The old lady listened to him open-mouthed, realising that his ‘stone soup’ was not quite what she had thought it was going to be. “On the other hand,” she thought to herself, “that broth is starting to smell very good, and I have a few of those ingredients - and more - around the house in any case. It’s a cold night and I haven’t the heart to turn him out, so let’s share a pot of his ‘stone soup’ together.” She gathered more ingredients, set him to preparing them as well, added some red wine to the steaming pot, and brought two glasses to the kitchen table. As they prepared the soup, he told her of his tramping ways, and she told him of the olden days in the village and of her happy life with her late husband, the village carpenter.
Before long, the soup was ready, and what a soup it was. Rich, redolent, thick, nourishing, warming and - really - fit for a king. With crusty bread, they had bowls of ‘stone’ soup together, lit by the fire in the hearth, while the snow fell outside and the frost set in. Finishing the wine, the old lady opened a bottle of her late husband’s home-made pear brandy, and they laughed and told stories together late into the night. Before he retired to his rough but warm straw bed by the fire, he took the spoon and carefully fetched his stone from the bottom of the pot. It did indeed smell like a stone that could magically make soup fit for a king. He took his leave from the old lady the next morning, both of them having enjoyed their mutual company of the night before. As he set out for the next village, or the one after that, he felt the stone in his pocket. “I might need that later,” he thought to himself.
In 2020, let’s share stone soup together.
