# The Magic Porridge Pot

_Brothers Grimm_ · 2 min read · ages 3-8

A poor girl is given a little pot that will cook sweet porridge at a word, and it feeds her and her mother. One day the mother sets it cooking and cannot stop it, and the porridge comes rolling down the street until the girl comes home, and after that anyone who wants to get home has to eat their way through.

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There was once a poor, good-hearted girl who lived alone with her mother. They had very little, and one morning there was nothing left in the house to eat at all.

So the girl went out into the forest to look for something, anything. Among the trees she met an old woman who seemed to know already why the child was walking there with such a sad face.

“Take this,” the old woman said, and she held out a little pot. “When you say, ‘Cook, little pot, cook,’ it will cook you sweet porridge, as good as any you have ever tasted. And when you say, ‘Stop, little pot,’ it will stop.”

The girl thanked her and carried the pot carefully home. From that day their hunger was over. Whenever they wished, they had a bowl of porridge, warm and thick and sweet, and their poverty troubled them no more.

Then one day the girl went out and left her mother alone in the kitchen. Her mother was hungry, so she set the little pot on the table and said, “Cook, little pot, cook.”

And it cooked. She ate until she was full and content, and then she wanted the pot to rest. But she did not know the word.

So the pot went on cooking. The porridge climbed to the rim and over it. It filled the kitchen and then the whole house, and then the house next door, and then it came flowing down the street, as though it meant to feed every hungry person in the world and would not stop until it had. People ran out of their doorways calling to one another, and nobody in the town knew what to do.

At last, when only one single house was still standing clear of it, the girl came home. She looked at the porridge rolling slowly down the street, and she said, “Stop, little pot.”

And it stopped, and cooked no more.

But the town was full of sweet porridge from end to end, and after that, anyone who wanted to get back home had to eat their way through it.

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- Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/sweet-porridge
- Source: Household Tales by Brothers Grimm, trans. Margaret Hunt (Project Gutenberg #5314) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314)
- Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: Household Tales by Brothers Grimm, trans. Margaret Hunt (Project Gutenberg #5314) — translation: author died 1859/1863 (+70 passed); translator Margaret Hunt died 1912 (+70 passed)
- License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)