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“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! Boil stones in butter, and you may sip the broth. (Fuller 1732) ‘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. ‘ 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. When the soup is made the stone may be thrown away.’  Published in The American magazine of wit, 1808. 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. 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 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. This is the aspect of the story that folklorists have focused on. 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. Stone Soup is an Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1548 folktale. 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. The Stone Soup story does not appear in any of the major eighteenth- or nineteenth-century collections of folk tales. It wasn’t published by Charles Perrault or the Grimm brothers. The first version I have found, that of Madame de Noyer (1720), is the work of an internationally renowned writer. 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. None make the claim that they were collected from a peasant. If a strong oral tradition for the Stone Soup story existed in the 18th and 19th centuries it is probable that also referenced the fairly substantial body of published stories. The First Published Version: Madame de Noyer, France 1720 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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 de 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. Phillipe Barbe’s Version, France, 1771 Historic Stone Soup Story from 1771 in French by M. Barbe One characteristic of folktales is that they are contextualized by each teller.  This is something the authors of the early Stone Soup stories clearly did. For example, the second version of the story was written by Phillipe Barbe (1723–1792) in his work Fables et