The Modern Legacy of Stone Soup

← Origin of the Stone Soup Folktale

Stone Soup as Allegory

References to stone soup were sometimes even allegorical. As an example, after retelling the story in The Circular, an 1868 publication of the utopian American Oneida community, the following moral is drawn from the story:

We think of this story when we hear Associationists vaunting the all-redeeming power of their system, and yet asking for good men to begin with. If they can find means to put the salt of brotherly love, the flour of industrious and enterprising habits, and the meal-bones of wealth and good morals into their pot, we have no doubt that their “stone soup” will be very good.¹

Marcia Brown and the Children’s Book

The great breakthrough for the Stone Soup story for today’s culture came with the fantastically popular retelling by Marcia Brown (1918–2015), the American children’s book author. Her 1947 retelling with soldiers rather than tramps has become the standard version, although historically it was a story about tramps, not soldiers. Her book has captured the imagination of generations and is the most likely source for the incredible popularity of stone soup as an organizing principle for every imaginable kind of activity.

Stone Soup Today

A search with the Google search engine brings up 386,000 web pages with the term. There is a stone soup comic strip, a “Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup” which is “an open-source single-player, role-playing roguelike game,” a Stone Soup Theater, a cafe, an inn, a food and nutrition magazine, a design company, an intentional community in Chicago, a circus, a beer, a set of lesson plans, on and on and on.

Please Share What You Know about Stone Soup

If you have any ideas about why the Stone Soup story resonates so strongly today; something to add to its history; insights from a different language; or maybe have your own retelling—in the spirit of the stone soup recipe itself, please help us enrich the stone soup story.

Next: A Note on St. Bernard’s Soup →