The First Published Version: Madame du Noyer, France, 1720

← Origin of the Stone Soup Folktale

revised: When the group of my college friends and I sat down in the dining hall lounge of our college at the University of California Santa Cruz to choose a name for the magazine by and for children that we were planning to start we each shared with the group a list of possible names. Stone Soup is the name that we all liked the best.

Stone Soup is the title of a European folk tale about making something out of nothing is possible when people work together. Our goal was to begin a literary project for children that would build the world’s first curated collection of children’s writing and art. Our purpose was simple. As young people ourselves we believed that the best way to teach creative writing was through peer-to-peer examples of quality work.

Our first project was a magazine. Stone Soup Magazine (1973-2024) was an early example of what is now mainstream in children’s creative writing pedagogy: teaching young writers through mentor texts written by their peers.

Writer-by-writer, artist-by-artist, one work at a time, over the last fifty plus years Stone Soup Magazine has grown into StoneSoup.com, the international portal for English-speaking writers between the ages of 8 and 18.

As we use the name, and many of you feel yourselves to be part of our Stone Soup community, I did some research on the story’s early origins that I am pleased to be sharing with you.

The first telling of the Stone Soup story that I have been able to locate is by a French woman, Madame du 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. She seems to have been a woman who burned the candle at both ends. She lived in exile from France for the last part of her life, dying in Holland. Voltaire visited her in exile.

Madame du Noyer’s version of the Stone Soup story, “Soupe au Caillou,” was published one year after she died, in a revised and expanded edition of collected letters that had been published a few years earlier.¹ Madame du 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. 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 du Noyer begins her tale, as so many good storytellers do, with an element of mystery:

“On me contoit l’autre jour que …”

“Someone told me the other day that . . .”

Her version of the story is set in Normandy, in northern France. Two Jesuits come to a farmhouse, but only the children are home. The Jesuits, who are hungry, convince the children that they are not begging for food, but in fact they are self-sufficient as they have a stone that makes soup. They tell the children that all they actually need is fire, a pot, and some water, and that their stone will do the rest. They remark that this is “curieux” and from that point the game is on. A fire is got ready, a pot put over, water is added, their stone is dropped in, and then, when the water is hot, this and that is asked for until, finally, a truly fabulous soup has been made. It is a story that always has a happy ending. Everyone always seems to have a good time making the soup, and the soup itself is always loved. In many versions the tramp (and it usually is a tramp) is asked for the recipe. In many other versions, like that of Madame du Noyer, all the neighbors and even all the other villagers are brought into the story. They attest to what a fabulous soup was made by a stone.

Of course, nobody thinks that a stone can make soup. Nobody is tricked into feeding the stranger.

The beggar is personable and is understood to be saying, “I’ll provide you some great entertainment in exchange for a meal.” As the banter surrounding the cooking was entertaining and by any standards the soup terrific, the making of stone soup always ends with smiles all around.

Next: Philippe Barbe, France, 1771 →