Q.
As you grit your teeth through the Fairy Tales of Grimm, you cannot help but notice how many characters fall prey to food-based horrors. It might be swift and brutal punishment for gluttony. It might be mind-warping hunger. Let’s follow the tatty children wandering too far from home in desperate search of a bite. Or how about the be-hooded villain out for a human snack?

How did food come to feature so prominently in Grimm’s Fairy Tales?

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A.

All these stories of all-consuming hunger aren’t surprising given that the Brothers Grimm – Jacob Ludwig and Wilhelm Carl – were thrown into poverty after the death of their magistrate father. As Wilhelm wrote in an 1812 letter:

‘We five people eat only three portions and only once a day. I usually save something for breakfast because I cannot bear waiting until five o’clock. Jacob usually eats only breakfast when each of us drinks but a single cup of coffee and eats nothing more than milk bread. We have done away with tea because sugar is much too expensive. But we cannot go around wearing improper clothing.’

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Doppelporträt der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann. 1855

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The Grimm Brothers’ charming, grisly stories sometimes conjure up dreams of simple, plentiful meals by the hearth…

The Warm Comfort of Porridge
Porridge – for those of you who have not enjoyed its brown sugared delights – is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as: ‘a chiefly British dish consisting of oatmeal or another meal or cereal boiled in water or milk.’  An informal British meaning, Oxford adds, is time spent in prison.  ‘I’m sweating it out doing porridge.’

In fairytales, thankfully, the porridge is already through the mushy boiling stage and rarely involves time in the clink. ‘Ahhh,’ says Goldilocks from the comfort of her bear home invasion, ‘this porridge is just right.’

Porridge is of similar comfort to the poor but pious little girl in ‘Sweet Porridge’. She is rescued from her aching stomach by the old woman, whose magic pot will conjure up good, sweet milk porridge whenever the starving girl says: “Little pot, cook.”

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The Fantasy of Abundance
With so many early readers also going hungry, it’s not surprising that Grimm’s fairy tales feature magical props that can conjure up heaps of delicious food on demand.

In ‘The Knapsack, the Hat and the Horn’, a magical tablecloth produces many exquisite dishes upon wishing. “If I could but eat my fill once more.”

‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’ features a little table that is not particularly beautiful, built from common wood. On hearing “table be set,” however, this ordinary table bedecks itself with cloth, cutlery, red wine and roasted meats.

That said, the Magic Table isn’t about willy-nilly sharing its food magic.

‘When the company was assembled, he put his table in the middle of the room and said, “Table be set,” but the little table did not move, and remained just as bare as any other table which does not understand language. Then the poor journeyman became aware that his table had been changed, and was ashamed at having to stand there like a liar. The relatives, however, mocked him, and were forced to go home without having eaten or drunk…’

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But the Grimm Brothers don’t hesitate to get grim. Live like a glutton, follow the gingery scent, grab at the glittering gumball, and you might find yourself fed through the merciless spikes of the meat grinder.

The Horror of Abundance
It takes a careless adult, of course, to show us how the promise of plenty can trigger gluttony. While the little Sweet Porridge girl is out, her mother takes her pot and instructs it to cook. The pot obeys, but the problem is that the mother doesn’t know what to say to make it stop.

‘So it went on cooking and the porridge rose over the edge, and still it cooked on until the kitchen and whole house were full, and then the next house, and then the whole street…’

The town is buried under gushing porridge until the wise girl returns and commands it to stop. Anyone else who wants to return home must eat their way back through the goo.

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Children Begone
And speaking of horridly misguided adults, Hansel and Gretel’s mother reacts to her family’s food scarcity in the most cold-blooded of ways… 😳

‘Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife: ‘What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?’

‘I’ll tell you what, husband,’ answered the woman, ‘early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest; there we will light a fire for them, and give each of them one more piece of bread, and then we will go to our work and leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them.’

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