At the edge of a small village, a poor widow and her daughter lived in a house with a flimsy thatched roof. They had nothing but a modest roof over their heads and a few chickens. Mostly they ate only what their mother gathered in the woods in the summer, and the only money they had was what their daughter earned by selling eggs at the market. At least it could buy bread and warm shoes for the winter.
One summer day the mother was not feeling well, so her daughter went into the forest to pick strawberries. She wrapped a slice of crusty bread in her apron, grabbed a big pot and went. When she had gathered a full pot of wild strawberries, she sat down at the well to eat. Then an old woman in tattered clothes appeared at the well. She looked like a beggar.
“My sweet girl, would you have a piece of bread for me? I haven’t had a morsel in my mouth since yesterday,” the old woman begged the girl.
“Why not, old woman, I will give you a whole slice,” replied the good-natured girl. “But maybe it’ll be too hard for you,” she said with a little worry in her voice.
The old woman rejoiced: “Thank God, my dear girl, thank God! But since you have helped me, I must give you something in return. Here is a cup. It’s not just any cup, it’s magical. If you say to him, ‘Cook, pot, cook!’ he’ll cook as much porridge as you want. When you’ve had enough porridge, you just say ‘Enough, pot, enough!’ and it stops cooking. You just have to remember what to say.” As soon as she handed the cup to the girl, she disappeared.
The daughter ran home, where she immediately told her mother about the strange gift from the old woman. The mother suggested that she should try it out right away. So the daughter put the pot on the table and timidly uttered, “Cook, pot, cook!” What the women saw was incredible. In no time at all, the pot was filled to the brim with porridge. The daughter hurriedly said, “Enough, pot, enough!” The porridge stopped boiling in the pot and the women grabbed their spoons and started tasting.
Hmmm, yummy! The porridge tasted divine, none of the women had ever tasted anything better. When they had eaten the whole batch of cooked porridge and had thoroughly gorged themselves, the daughter still had to collect the eggs from the chickens and run to the market.
As the mother waited at home for her daughter, she looked around for the magic pot. And she got hungry. The porridge was so good. She would have liked another cup. And the young one was still nowhere to be found. After a while, the mother couldn’t hold it any longer and said hungrily, “Cook, pot, cook!”
She went to get a spoon, but when she came back, the porridge was overflowing from the pot onto the table. Startled, she didn’t know what to do and ran for the big pot to put the overflowing pot in. Well, when she came up with the pot, the porridge was already spilling off the table and onto the floor, making its way through the room.
The mother tried to stop the flow of porridge as best she could. She shouted every command she could think of to stop the porridge. “Pot, stop!” “Pot, don’t cook!” But none of those words were the right ones to stop the magic porridge pot. And so the porridge began to flood the whole cottage, and the woman had to climb up to the roof and sit behind the chimney to keep from drowning in the porridge.
But if it had only ended in the cottage! The porridge rolled out through the doors and windows and began to spill everywhere. It flooded the road and the countryside, and the pot was still boiling with more porridge. The poor widow watched the whole porridge disaster from the roof, but could do no more than wring her hands. She still didn’t know how to stop the pot.
Who knows how the whole ordeal would have ended if her daughter hadn’t just returned from the market. When she saw the disaster, she exclaimed: “Enough, pot, enough!”
Fortunately, those were the right words to stop the flow of porridge. But there was already plenty of it all over the village. Peasants returning from their toil in the fields could not get through the mountain of porridge, they had to dig their way to their houses.
So perhaps the delicious porridge came in handy after their hard work. It’s certain that the poor girl with the good heart never had to go hungry again thanks to the mug.
