Stone Soup

Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal.

The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor.

More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient, like potatoes, onions, cabbages, peas, celery, tomatoes, sweetcorn, meat (like chicken, pork and beef), milk, butter, salt and pepper.

As they concoct stories of delinquent caterers and crashed champagne trucks, the friendly townspeople contribute their time and resources, the result being a magical wedding ceremony.

Gerald P. Murphy's stage adaptation of "Stone Soup" was published by Lazy Bee Scripts in 2008 and has had successful productions in US, UK and France.

William Butler Yeats' play The Pot of Broth (1904) tells a version of the story in which a clever Irish tramp uses his wits to swindle a shrewish medieval housewife out of her dinner.

[10] The story is the basis of Marcia Brown's 1947 children's book Stone Soup: An Old Tale (1947),[11] which features soldiers tricking miserly villagers into cooking them a feast.

[13][14] In 1965, Gordon R. Dickson published a short story called "Soupstone", where a headstrong pilot is sent to solve a problem on a planet under the guise of a highly educated and competent official.

French author and illustrator Anais Vaugelade published a children's picture book, Une soupe au caillou, in which the tramp from the original folktale is replaced by a wandering wolf, and the old woman by a curious hen.

He did this during the Battle of Sicily, in the advance on Palermo, and again in the campaign in northwest Europe, near Metz when his 3rd US Army was officially halted during Operation Market Garden.