Thoughts on stones (i)

Friday Fragment #35

Staggering across the shelves of Chesil Beach, an ankle that rolls, corrects, and rolls again, as each foot plants on top of stones that rest on top of stones. An alphabet of grey across the floor – ash, birch, charcoal – and as many shades between beige and brown as you can imagine: clay, saffron, potato. And as many hues of potato as it’s possible to know: tubers of red, pink and purple stretch as far as the eye can see, over the slopes and down to the sea. On this beach, once before, my daughter, a wind bouncing fiercely off the sea, hair swept up and licking around her face like a laughter of flame. Her mother and father exchange glances, faces crumpled, folded in by forgivable pride. Children make pride permissible. An ankle rolls again… | Over twenty or so years, I’ve typeset variations on a recipe for stone soup into perhaps half a dozen different books, no two recipes ever being the same. The origins of the dish belong to the centuries-old fable of a beggar or stranger arriving into a new village without the means to eat. On being refused alms by the locals, he asks instead if he can perhaps receive a pan and water so as to boil and make a simple soup from the stone he carries with him. Curious, the villagers oblige. As the water reaches a roll, he wonders perhaps if they can spare just a little seasoning, so as to enhance the flavour. A stir and a sniff later, he suggests that a few slices of carrot would be an excellent extra addition. As the stone boils away, scraps of vegetable and meat are all brought to the stranger to be added to the pot. The final dish, shared by the stranger with the masses who had gathered around the pot to watch the boiling stone, is judged to be excellent. Stone soup is the simple dish that has historically linked and vindicated every new food writer: there are few if any original ideas in food, but infinite variations. These variations are refreshed and tweaked generationally, repackaged with different myths and details, and shared between different people, but each has an age-old stone simmering at its centre. The stone is at the heart of the recipe, and the heart of the recipe is not the cabbage leaf, not the side of bacon and not the crust of bread, but the story.

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