Two Jesuits come to a farmhouse, but only the children are home. Her version of the story is set in Normandy, in northern France. Madame de Noyer begins her tale, as so many good storytellers do, with an element of mystery: You will find it in books that attribute it to other authors, but they rarely make the changes to her telling that are required to really claim authorship. Madame de Noyer’s fame was so great that in French her version of the story is the most common version through the end of the nineteenth-century. Madame de Noyer’s version of the Stone Soup story, “Soupe au Caillou” ( Madame du Noyer (1720), was published one year after she died, in a revised and expanded edition of collected letters that had been published a few years earlier. She lived in exile from France for the last part of her life, dying in Holland.

She seems to have been a woman who burned the candle at both ends. The first telling of the Stone Soup story that I have been able to locate is by a French woman, Madame de Noyer (1663–1719), a female journalist, a woman of letters and a dynamic personality who lived what can only be described as an interesting life. The First Published Version: Madame de Noyer, France 1720 If a strong oral tradition for the Stone Soup story existed in the 18 th and 19 th centuries it is probable that also referenced the fairly substantial body of published stories. None make the claim that they were collected from a peasant. We will never know who “told her” the story, or whether she read it in a book that has not been identified, or whether she made the whole thing up! All of the early versions I have come across are already polished tales. The first version I have found, that of Madame de Noyer (1720), is the work of an internationally renowned writer.

It wasn’t published by Charles Perrault or the Grimm brothers. The Stone Soup story does not appear in any of the major eighteenth- or nineteenth-century collections of folk tales. Where does the original Stone Soup story come from? Is it a genuine folk tale in the sense that it had a long life in an oral tradition before being published in print? Or is it a creation of authors writing for hire? Or a bit of both? I think it is probably a bit of both. Stone Soup is an Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1548 folktale. Folklorists place the Stone Soup story within the “clever man” category of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore classification system that they use to organize the entire folkloric tradition. This is the aspect of the story that folklorists have focused on. The Stone Soup story revolves around a clever man with a charismatic personality who can get people to help him when their first instinct is not to. You can listen to their lively retelling of the tale on Megaphone here or at iTunes here! Origin of the Stone Soup Folktale Title page to the 1808 British magazine with the first English version of the Stone Soup story

The recipe published in 1808 is quite similar to the one in the version of the story made by the By Kids For Kids Story Time podcast in 2019.

When the soup is made the stone may be thrown away.’ Published in The American magazine of wit, 1808. ‘ Take a large stone, put it into a sufficient quantity of boiling water properly season it with pepper and salt add three or four pounds of good beef, a handful of pot-herbs, some onions, a cabbage, and three or four carrots. ‘Give me a piece of paper’ (said the traveler) ‘and I’ll write it down for you,’ which he did as follows:-A receipt to-make Stone Soup. “Stone Soup,” engraving by Walter Melion for the cover of the first issue of Stone Soup Some Recipes for Stone Soup from 1732, 1808–and 2019!īoil stones in butter, and you may sip the broth. ( Fuller 1732)

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