DEE DOT'S
CHOICE.
Is there a difference between oatmeal and
porridge?
Yes. Porridge is what they eat in fairy
tales.
Once upon a time there was a good little
girl who lived alone with her mother at the far end
of a village on the edge of a great
forest.
They were happy together in their small
wooden house with its thick warm thatch, although
there was very little to eat. And one day her
mother looked in at the larder; and there was not
even as much as a dry crust of bread or a cheese
rind on the
shelf.
And she said to her daughter,
"Esmeralda, my dear there is nothing to eat what so
ever. Not a crumb. See if you can find just a
handful or two of the late blackberries in the
forest; or maybe a few
nuts."
So Esmeralda went into the forest, and she
had not picked more than six or seven late berries,
and they over ripe, when there came an old woman
along the glade of the forest, and she approached
and said to the child:
"Sometimes when I have been sitting looking
down at the village I have heard you singing at
your work, my dear. And as it will soon be your
birthday, I have brought you a little gift. It is
this little pot. When you are hungry and you say
'Cook, little pot, cook!' it will give you as much
porridge as ever you want. And when, having had
enough, you say, 'Stay, littlle pot, stay!' it will
stay. All you need do is to keep in cleaned and
burnished and keep it
safe."
Almost to happy to contain herself,
Esmeralda ran home with the pot to her mother. And
there and then, her mother put the pot on the
table; and Esmeralda whispered, "Cook, little pot,
cook!"
Instantly smoke began to rise out of the
pot, and a gentle bubbling was heard, and and what
was within rose to view, sweet as milk, rich as
cream, and steaming hot! And presently Esmeralda
and her mother were enjoying as fine a feast of as
toothsome a porridge as they had ever tasted in
their lives. And so it went on, day after day. But
they were careful of the little pot, kept it sweet
and burnished on a shelf all by itself, and never
set it cooking unless they were
hungry.
Once on a time
however, Esmeralda went off to see her Aunt Joram
who lived on the other side of the forest. And in
the evening, her mother, finding the house empty
and comfortless in her absence fancied a mouthfull
of porridge for supper. And she put the pot on the
table, and she said, "Cook, little pot, cook," and
at once it began to steam and rise as usual, and
the pot began to cook, and the4 porridge to
come.
But then, poor creature, when she wanted
the pot to stop cooking, she could not remember the
magic words. The more she tried to think, the more
confused she
became.
"Stop, little pot! Cease little pot ! No
more little pot ! Hold little pot ! . .
. " Nothing had the slightest effect. The pot went
on cooking, until the porridge came tumbling over
the edge, and still it kept on, and ran over the
table and down onto the floor, and over the bed -
everywhere, everywhere, until at last the whole
house was full, and then the next house, and the
street - it was just as if that small pot's one
desire was to satisfy the hunger of the whole
world. And still the porridge came, and no one knew
how to stop it. At last only a single house
remained - one outside the village, standing up on
its little hill like an island in one immense Sea
of Porridge. And that evening Esmiralda came
home.
"Oh, oh, oh !" she cried seeing the strange
scene; "Oh, oh, oh !" and she ran to her mother's a
mile round through the trees. "Stay, little pot,
stay !" she cried and the pot
stayed.
And you'll never guess what happened
then.... Anyone whosoever wished to visist the
village after that had to eat his way in, and then
- unless he went back by the way he had come -- to
eat his way out
again.
Now Seligor doesn't know who wrote this
story for it is just called An Old Tale,
though I seem to remember a Indian story that
Dadadzi sent me over from India, being very
similar. I like it though, all that porridge, golly
they must have been eating it for moths, maybe
years.
I just popped over to wiki to ask about
Sweet Porridge and it seems this could be one of
their small
tales.
Posted 16:07