The Case of the Missing Kiss, by A.M. Offenwanger

Editor’s note: This fun and informative essay is filled with links you can follow to learn more. It’s a departure for EC, because it has been previously published, but A.M. Offenwanger is a long-standing friend of this site, and this essay is a great example of how to have a good time while sharing information. It’s a win-win.

I’ve been studying Frog Prince tales. You know the ones: princess meets frog, he does her a service, in return he asks for a kiss, she kisses him, and hey presto, he’s turned into a handsome prince. Right? Wrong. If you look at the Grimms’ version—tale #1 in the Children’s and Household Tales—you’re doing okay until you get to the kissing part. It’s not there. It quite simply doesn’t exist. The act that gets the prince unfroggified is one of gross violence: the princess chucks the frog against her bedroom wall (in the 1812 version, with a lovely onomatopoeic “Splat!”). That’s right, attempted murder. When he falls down from the wall—I’ve always had trouble visualising that bit—he’s a handsome prince with “friendly eyes,” and the princess happily goes to bed with him.

 

That’s fine, you say. There are other versions of that story that have the kiss in it, aren’t there? Well, not that I can find, at least in the old tales. Ashliman’s Folktexts page on “Frog Kings: folktales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 440 about slimy suitors” lists twelve frog husband stories, and not one breaks the spell with a kiss. In fact, several of them, such as the Scottish “The Well of the World’s End,” end in even greater violence than the Grimms’ “Frog King”: the frog gets the princess to chop off his head, which has of course the effect of freeing the prince; in a Korean variant, the bride cuts open the frog’s skin. In fact, one wonders if the change in the story trope to attempting to break the spell with a kiss was a deliberate plant by the Froggy Liberation Front—girls going around experimentally kissing frogs in order to find a prince for themselves is a lot less detrimental to your average amphibian than being thrown against a wall. And just think of the messes we save ourselves.

 

So, setting aside the Froggy Liberation Front, where did the kiss come from? Heidi Anne Heiner, of SurLaLune Fairytales, says in her Annotations to the Frog King that the kiss first surfaced in English translations of the story, following Edgar Taylor’s translation from 1823. Taylor hasn’t got the kiss in there, though. In his version, the frog is freed from his spell by the princess letting him sleep in her bed for three nights. Ashliman points out that Taylor’s “translation” is, in fact, a mash-up of two of the Grimms’ tales: “The Frog King, or Iron Henry” and “The Frog Prince.” The latter is a tale which was dropped from the Grimms’ collection after the first edition because of its similarity to the first story. In this, the princess’ problem is not a dropped golden ball, but the attempt to get a drink of clean water from the well. The princess’ two elder sisters fail, because they refuse to promise the frog to become his sweetheart; the youngest girl promises, and so the frog lets the water run clear again. Taylor’s version takes the first half of “The Frog King,” the bit with the golden ball, and the conclusion of “The Frog Prince,” and combines them into a somewhat more gentle tale. Ashliman figures that Taylor thought English readers of the 1820s would not accept the violence in the Grimms’ version.

 

Still no kiss, though. However, it’s interesting that the earliest English translations of the German tale already conclude with a sexualized version of the spell-breaking—I mean, having the prince, albeit in frog shape, spending three nights in the girl’s bed is suggestive enough. I wonder (and that’s just me speculating, I have no proof for this) if the true origin of the kiss isn’t a form of prudery—subsequent translators or retellers being uncomfortable with all this being-in-bed-together stuff, and changing it to a somewhat more chaste kiss, which can be accomplished fully dressed and far enough away from the scene of the, ahem, marital act to keep young minds uncorrupted. In fact, even the Grimms moved away from their original telling to expurgate any references which might be suggestive of sex: in the 1812 version, the princess throws the frog against the wall by her bed, and he literally falls right into her mattress; by the final version of 1857, the bed is no longer mentioned (Ashliman does a rather interesting side-by-side comparison of the two versions here).

However, there are later variants with a kiss. There is a charming Pomeranian story in a collection from 1891 called “De Koenigin un de Pogg”—“The Queen and the Frog,” in which a king goes off to war, leaving his wife behind. One day she drops her wedding ring down the well. The frog offers to fetch it back on the promise of marriage. When he comes to collect on the promise, the queen tries to fob him off with the maid, but he insists it has to be she who opens the door, gives him food, and finally kisses him. She’s disgusted, but gets her maid to blindfold her so at least she doesn’t have to look at the ugly frog while she kisses him. And then there is a loud bang, and the frog turns into her husband! He’s been enchanted by a wicked witch out on the battlefield to be a frog until a princess kisses him better, and so he’s swum through rivers and lakes and puddles until he got home, because, he says, “he was pretty sure that only his wife would be willing to kiss him.” Aaaw, that’s so sweet. It’s quite possibly my favorite “Frog King” variant so far. However, it’s so close in storyline to the Grimms’ that it is almost certain that it was influenced by the older story; it’s unlikely that this is an independently developed variant.

 

It’s rather interesting that the trope of the redeeming kiss is what’s stuck so solidly in the popular imagination. What is it that makes the kiss so popular that it has almost taken on a life of its own?

There is one more amusing piece of research I came across in searching for the missing kiss: “The Frog Prince: Tale and Toxicology” is an article in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry by David M. Siegel, MD, and Susan H. McDaniel (American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 61.4 [1991]: 558-562.). The abstract says: “Bufotenin is a substance present in the skin of some common species of frogs, and its ingestion (such as would occur in licking or kissing a frog) can result in vivid hallucinations. This biological property offers an explanation for the portrayal of frogs in folklore as creatures of transformation, or as intermediaries with other worlds.” Apparently toad-licking for the purposes of getting high is a not uncommon practise in some circles.

 

So what do you think—all those frog-kissing princesses, were they just seeing things? Perhaps there wasn’t really a prince there—they just had hallucinations of one, and in fact married the frog in all his amphibian glory. But then, as long as they see him as Prince Charming, it’s all good. A little bit of delusion can go a long ways towards marital bliss.

 

Note: This post was originally published in 2014 on quillandqwerty.wordpress.com. “The Mystery of the Missing Kiss” also inspired a fairy tale flash fiction story, which was published on Enchanted Conversation in 2018: "Hitting the Wall, by A. M. Offenwanger."

***

Bio: Angelika is a reader, writer, blogger, and editor who has loved fairy tales and folklore from the time she was a little girl—so much so that when she was grown, she wrote a master’s thesis on them. Her favorite stories to read, write and study are those set in other worlds, whether that’s fantastical worlds full of magic, far-off places, or long-gone times.

Follow her blog at www.amovitam.ca or on Facebook @amoffenwanger.

***

Image, one of my all-time favorites—what an expression she has!—is by Walter Crane.

On Spindles and a Pet Peeve, By A.M. Offenwanger

Editor’s note: I loved the outraged tone in this post! I’m very much like that about my own peeves. (I won’t get started.) I also love how Angelika isn’t just outraged; she also teaches. I’ll never see spinning the same way. Enjoy!

Enchanted Conversation recently republished an older post by Elizabeth Creith, a highly informative article on flax that is aptly entitled "Straw Into Gold." As a fairly new convert to spinning, it caught my interest—and it reminded me of one of my pet peeves where "spinning and fairy tales" is concerned. 

Full disclosure: I let my fascination with "Sleeping Beauty"—my favorite fairy tale—led me down the garden path into learning to spin. First it was a drop spindle, then a little castle wheel, and now I own an old Ashford Traditional, which is one of those really classic items that look exactly like what you'd expect to see when you hear "spinning wheel." You know, a big flywheel; a treadle; a thing that whizzes around; sharp pointy bits sticking out at every angle for unwary princesses to prick their fingers on and fall into hundred-year sleeps... 

Actually, no. My spinning wheel, which is one of the earliest iterations of this model of wheel, has no pointy bits on it anywhere. None. Zero. Nada. It does have the flywheel and the treadle and the thing that whizzes around, though. The latter item is called the flyer, and it contains, right in its center, the spindle. Which, on this kind of wheel, is a hollow tube. Did I mention "no pointy bits"?

So what, then, did the princess prick her finger on?

That's the million-dollar question, isn't it. The princess pricked her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, and... Hold on. Where did you get that idea?

Let me guess: from a movie. For example, the 1959 Disney cartoon. Or the 2014 remake thereof, Maleficent. Or its 2019 sequel. All of which are prime examples of the aforementioned pet peeve of mine: the utter lack of research that seems to have gone into the "spinning" part of filming stories that are centered on, well, spinning. I can forgive the 1959 cartoonists - they didn't have the power of Google to assist them. But the 2014 film makers? Puh-lease. Five minutes on the Internet would have told them that a real spinning wheel does not have sharp spikes poking out of the top. I have no idea what that princess-pricking thing in the Disney films is supposed to be; obviously, we're dealing with a cursed magical object here, because it has no purpose whatsoever in real spinning.

Moreover, five minutes of reading the "original" versions of "Sleeping Beauty" (by which I mean the tales as they were originally written down by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm) would have told the filmmakers that the tales don't even mention a spinning wheel. "The princess should have her hand pierced with a spindle," they say, and in the Grimms, when the princess encounters the spinning old woman in the tower, she asks her, "What is that thing that is so merrily bouncing about?" Then she takes "hold of the spindle" and, well, you know the rest. All of which clearly says that the spindle in question is a hand spindle, not one set in a spinning wheel. 

"Rumpelstiltskin" films are no better on the spinning-research front. Rumpelstiltskin definitely uses a spinning wheel, not a hand spindle: the miller's daughter is given "a spinning wheel and a reel" for spinning straw into gold, and when the mannikin sits down to fulfil the task, the wheel goes "whir, whir, whir," and the bobbin is full (the original tellers of the tales knew exactly what a spinning wheel in full motion sounds like). However, in the films, once again nobody seems to bother doing any research on how spinning is actually done, not even enough to have the actors pretend convincingly. I've seen actors pull the yarn off the bobbin instead of feeding it on, have Rumpelstiltskin poking a piece of straw at the wheel as if he's trying to tickle the poor thing into submission, or just randomly pitch straw in the direction of the wheel where it precipitates out onto the bobbin as gold (no doubt occasioned by the static the turn of the flywheel generates). 

I mean, come on! How hard can it be to watch a few Youtube videos on what spinning looks like? Or figure out what the parts of a spinning wheel actually are and what they're used for? If you insist on having Sleeping Beauty prick her finger on a spinning wheel rather than a hand spindle, at least make it a wheel with a quill spindle instead of a flyer assembly. They're rare, but they do exist; I could even buy such a spindle for my Ashford Traditional, and a wicked-sharp-looking thing it is too.

Somehow, that lack of research into spinning seems to me an indication of a lack of respect for this ancient craft. For millennia, spinning was the driving force of civilization. Every inch of thread, every square centimeter of cloth originated from a woman's spindle or wheel (and yes, it was primarily women who did the spinning). Every piece of clothing, every blanket, every sail on every sailing ship exploring the high seas—they all started with spinning. Spinning, spinning, spinning, all day long and into the night. Is it any wonder that some of our most beloved stories, the ones that everyone knows, that are told over and over again, center around the craft of spinning? The least we could do is honor it when we're spinning a new yarn of a retelling of those fairy tales.

***

All images by A.M. Offenwanger. The first one is of Angelika’s spinning wheel at rest. The second is of the wheel in action, and the third is of her flax distaff and spindle.

***

Bio: Angelika is a reader, writer, blogger, and editor who has loved fairy tales and folklore from the time she was a little girl—so much so that when she was grown, she wrote a master’s thesis on them. Her favorite stories to read, write and study are those set in other worlds, whether that’s fantastical worlds full of magic, far-off places, or long-gone times.

Follow her blog at www.amovitam.ca or on Twitter @amoffenwanger 

Throwback Thursday: FAIRY TALE FLASH - Beast by A. M. Offenwanger

He staggered on his clumsy legs,
then dropped down onto all fours.
Like an animal...

Editor’s note: This is a perfect example of flash fiction that packs a punch. I’m also a big fan of A.M. Offenwanger’s work overall. For those of you interested in submitting for the Surprise Christmas in July Writing Contest, this story might give you inspiration. Snowy weather is close enough to the theme of the contest to count! Learn more about the contest HERE.

The snow kept falling thicker and thicker. Whirling, blowing, biting, cutting. Clinging to his whiskers, to his eyelashes, to the hair on the side of his face. His nose and cheeks had grown numb, his fingers so cold he could no longer bend them. When he tried to raise them to his face to brush the snow out of his beard, they felt like hard claws on the end of big, clumsy, fur-covered paws; claws that had no feeling in them and could not move to his will.

He tried to climb up the side of the ravine, reached for a snow-covered branch. Could not close his hands on it—where were his thumbs? He staggered on his clumsy legs, then dropped down onto all fours.

Like an animal.

A beast.

They had turned him into a beast.

Robbed him of his inheritance, robbed him of his birth right.

Robbed him of who he was, robbed him of himself.

A growl rose deep within him, a roar.

“Rrrrraaaaaaahr!”

Harder and harder, the snow whirled about him, the wind roaring, shrieking, slashing with a thousand cruel knives, beating with a thousand brutal clubs.

His enemy had robbed him, his foe had taken all he had.

He was an animal, a great, fur-covered beast.

He fell and lay where he had fallen.

The snow piled up against his back, shrieked over him, buried him beneath a shroud of ice.

The flame of roaring in his breast died down. He let his head sink to the ground, pillowed on snow. There was nothing now but snow, ice, wind, cold.

Cold.

So very cold.

A beast barked in the distance. Loud, insistent, like a drum beat that cut through the shrieking of the gale. The sharp sound of a whistle, the voice of a human. The barking beast fell silent.

Humans.

He was no longer human, he was a beast.

He dragged himself up on his four feet, lumbered up the bank, away from the ravine.

Pointed his muzzle to the wind, caught the smell of a wood fire.

A fire.

Where there was fire, there was warmth.

Where there was warmth, there was life.

Life.

Life for beast, or man.

Fire.

Smoke.

A light.

The light of a cottage, shining through the trees.

He shied away.

Humans had guns, sharp knives.

Humans would hunt a beast.

He was a beast.

But yet…

The wind shrieked in his ear, it tore at him, it ripped his fur. It froze him to his very core.

Cold.

So very cold.

Fire, warmth, light.

Light.

Warmth.

Help.

Cold, so very cold.

Warmth.

He crept across the clearing, staggered through the snow.

Pulled himself up on the porch, fell against the door.

Scratched his paws against the wood.

The door opened up.

“C-c-c-cold,” he said, stumbling inside, “p-p-please,” his lips and tongue scarcely forming words.

“Girls,” a voice fell on his frozen ears, “brush off the snow, he’s frozen stiff. Snow White, the kettle on the hob. Rose Red, the fire stoked! I’ll get a quilt. What a night to be outside! Come, friend, come take rest. Rest and warmth. Come, you are safe.”

A.M. Offenwanger is a writer, reader, blogger, and editor.

Follow her blog Amo Vitam

and on Twitter @amoffenwanger

and Facebook here

Cover: Amanda Bergloff

FAIRY TALE FOOD: The Gingerbread House by A.M. Offenwanger

Editor's Note: It's December, and it's the perfect time to make a gingerbread house! EC is pleased to showcase author A.M. Offenwanger's thoughts on fairy tales and food this month with her article that includes a recipe for a gingerbread house (originally published on her fabulous blog.)

“What came first,” my husband asked when I made this gingerbread house last year, “the pastry or the fairy tale?”

Good question. So I looked it up. According to the internet (scholarly fount of all wisdom), there isn’t any clear indication of when the first gingerbread house made its appearance on the scene of Christmas goodies, but it does seem that it was after the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel” became popular. Gingerbread men or other gingerbread figures for gift-giving had been around since the Middle Ages, more or less, but shaping it into a house and glueing candy on it seems to have been inspired by this lovely story of child abandonment, attempted infanticide, and cannibalism.

I have to say that that fairy tale was never one of my favorites – I prefer stories without bad guys, and this one has not only one very bad witch, but a nasty stepmother to boot. I did like Gretel’s bad-ass vanquishing of the witch, and the ending where Hansel and Gretel get home to their father and live happily ever after.

What I didn’t notice as a kid, though, was that Daddy isn’t that much of a good guy either. In fact, he’s an utter wet noodle; all his moaning and guilty conscience doesn’t make up for the fact that he lets his wife talk him into abandoning his kids in the forest. It even occurs to him that it would be better for him to share his last piece of bread with them and then starve together with them, but does he act on it? Not Mr Wet Dishrag, no. Standing up to the wife would require a backbone, and that he hasn’t got. Macbeth, indeed, has nothing on Hansel Sr.

Another thing I never knew is that originally, the Grimms told the story with the nasty wife being not the children’s stepmother, but their real, biological mother (the stepmother entered the narrative around 1843, according to Hans-Jörg Uther*). Now doesn’t that put a nice spin on the story? Your mom is feeling a bit peckish, so in order as not to starve, she sends you out into the woods to die. Oh yeah, and Daddy ties a stick to a tree that makes a tapping noise so you think your parents are still around, chopping wood, while they sneak away and leave you to your doom. You’d think the witch would come as somewhat of a welcome relief after that kind of loving home life… So that’s your tragic backstory, beforeyou even run into the cannibalistic witch with the overkill kiddie trap.

Oh yes, that trap? Grimms says specifically that the witch only built the bread house to lure children, not because it was her preferred construction material for superior country cottages. I’d call that overkill, wouldn’t you? Because, as I can tell you from experience, building a gingerbread house is a lot of work.

However, it’s also a lot of fun. Here is a relatively simple version (not cheap, because of the honey, but that does give it a great taste and texture). No windows made of spun-sugar “glass”, but hey, if you want, you can add those, too.

Incidentally, you might note there is no ginger in this “gingerbread” – there never is in German Lebkuchen. Just plenty of other spices, which were historically so expensive they were reserved for Christmas baking (and sometimes all lumped together under the term “pepper”, hence the alternative term “Pfefferkuchen” – pepper cake – for gingerbread. You might know it from “Pfeffernüsse“, the cookie).

Gingerbread House**

(this makes one large house plus several tiny ones and a bunch of gingerbread people or bears. For just a house, half the recipe will do. Imperial measurements are approximate.)

HOUSE

-1 kg (2 lbs) Honey

-250 ml (1 c) Water

bring to a boil; cool.

Mix/knead into:
-650 g (5 c) Rye Flour
-600 g (5 c) White Flour
-100 g (3 oz) each finely chopped Candied Lemon & Orange peel
-40 g (3 Tbsp) Lebkuchen-Spice (see below)***
-30 g (3 Tbsp) Baking Soda

Let rest for a few hours, up to a day or two.
For cookies or small gingerbread houses, roll out 1 cm (1/4″) thick, bake about 7-9 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

Dimensions for the large witch’s house:

Base plate, ca. 20×30 cm (8×12″), prick with fork, bake 12-18 minutes.

Roof (x2): 13×20 cm (5×8″).

House walls: (x2) 8×16 cm (3×6″); (x2) 16 cm (6″) wide with 16 cm (6″) high at the point of the gable.

Cut windows out of the side walls and a door out of one of the gable walls (can also be done immediately after baking). Bake ca. 12 min.

Make fence posts, window shutters, chimney pieces, small trees etc. out of the remaining bits of dough – maybe even a Hansel and Gretel and a witch?

Cool everything.

ICING

-500 g (1 lb) Icing Sugar

-2 Tbsp Lemon Juice

-3 Egg Whites

Mix together to thick consistency (kind of like peanut butter). If it’s too runny, add more icing sugar; if too stiff, more lemon juice or water, a teaspoonful at a time. If you want to keep it vegan, skip the egg whites and just use lemon juice.

For the house construction, you might want to trim the edges with a knife so they are straight and hold together better. Support the roof plates (prop a cup under the bottom edge) until the icing has dried a bit and they no longer slide off. When things are holding together, go to town with covering everything in icing “snow” and candies. “Icicles” at the corners of the roof can be achieved by dribbling runny icing down the edge.

***Lebkuchen-Spice (Neunerlei – Nine Spice)

Lebkuchen spice can be bought ready-mixed, but if you can’t get it, here’s my own blend that I made up from the ingredients list on the package. All the spices are ground.

Zest of 1 orange & 1 lemon
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp coriander
1/4 tsp star anise
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp mace
1/4 tsp fennel
1/2 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp cardamom

To build into full-size cottage, multiply ingredients by approximately 500. Proceed as above, but build roof out of smaller tiles and use scaffolding for construction. In case of intrusion by marauding small children, keep phone number of child welfare services on hand to report the parents for abandonment.

References:

*Hans-Jörg Uther, Handbuch zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. p.13.

**recipe adapted from: Christian Teubner & Annette Wolter, Backvergnügen wie noch nie. München: Gräfe und Unzer, 1984.

A.M. Offenwanger is a writer, reader, blogger, and editor.

Follow her blog Amo Vitam
and on Twitter @amoffenwanger
and Facebook here

All Photos by A.M. Offenwanger

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BEYOND THE GLASS SLIPPER

FAIRY TALE FOOD & RECIPE OF THE MONTH: Sleeping Beauty and Sauce Robert by A.M. Offenwanger

What does Sleeping Beauty have 
in common with Sauce Robert?
A.M. Offenwanger shares a fairy tale and combines it with a recipe in this month's 
Fairy Tale Food feature:

”Sauce Robert, Julia Child says in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, is a brown mustard sauce with lots of onions and white wine, and is served with roast or braised pork, boiled beef, broiled chicken, hot meat leftovers or hamburgers. Obviously, Julia Child hadn’t read “Sleeping Beauty”, or she would have added “roast or broiled baby” to that list of acceptable meats. Well, at least the ogress thinks that Sauce Robert would go well with cooked toddler; her chef disagrees.

What? You didn’t know about the ogress and the broiled baby? What version of “Sleeping Beauty” were you looking at? Oh, probably the same one I’m familiar with—lovely, tender Grimms’. That’s right, when it comes to “Sleeping Beauty”, the Grimms were the sweet, child-friendly storytellers; Charles Perrault’s version is a whole lot more grim. If you think that “Sleeping Beauty” is the story of a princess who pokes her hand with a spindle, falls asleep for a hundred years in a rosebush-covered castle, is kissed awake by the prince, and lives happily-ever-after-the-end, you only know half the tale—the half the Germans decided to write down as “Dornröschen”.

The French, on the other hand, went a little further than that—PG13, at least. Oh yes. Sex, teen pregnancy, family violence, attempted cannibalism, poisonous creepy-crawlies, this one has it all.

Up to the point where the prince finds the beautiful princess on her beautiful bed, the Perrault version is pretty much the same as the Grimms’, but then it goes off the rails.

The prince, after a lovely wedding night with Beauty (who, from what I can gather, is around fifteen or sixteen at this point), goes home and lies to his parents about where he’s been—in the cottage of a charcoal burner, he says (uh-huh, yeah, sure you were!). His dad, being “a good man”, believes him; the queen, his mother, for whose benefit the lie was concocted in the first place, does not. The mother, you see, is an ogress who likes to snack on children. The prince keeps inventing excuses for “having to go hunting”, so he can go back to Beauty’s castle. What they’re doing there you can deduce from the subsequent births of their daughter, Morning, and a year later their son, Day.

Once the prince’s good-but-gullible father dies, the young man announces his marriage and brings his wife and children home to Mama Ogress. Bad choice. The newly-minted king goes off to war with his next-door neighbour, and—what do you know?—almost as soon as he’s gone the dowager queen gets a little peckish. She packs her daughter-in-law, the young queen, off to a country house in the woods, and orders cook to roast up her granddaughter, little Morning, with—you guessed it—Sauce Robert. No, really, Perrault specifically says so. The cook tricks the ogress by giving her roast lamb instead; the following week, when she thinks she’s eating little Day, it’s a kid (i.e. baby goat, not baby human), and finally venison in place of Queen à la Sauce Robert.

The ogress quite enjoys the meals, until she finds out the queen and her children are still alive, whereupon she loses her ogreish temper and commands them all, cook included, to be executed by immersion in a tub full of poisonous toads, vipers and snakes. Fortunately, at the last minute, the young king comes back from war (I guess he got off work early), and the ogress-queen-mother is so peeved she commits suicide by jumping into the viper tub. The king, being of a somewhat sentimental disposition, “could not but be very sorry, for she was his mother”, but consoles himself with his wife and children, and they do, presumably, live happily ever after.

And you thought the Grimms were grim…

But at least Perrault didn’t go as far as the even older Italian version, Giambattista Basile’s “Sole, Luna e Talia” (“Sun, Moon and Talia”). It follows roughly the same outline as Perrault’s story, except that in this version, the ogress isn’t the young king’s mother, but his wife. That’s right, the guy is already married when he finds the sleeping Talia—who, incidentally, is doomed to sleep as long as a sliver of poisoned flax is still stuck in her finger. So this king doesn’t even bother waking the girl up; he feels “his blood course hotly through his veins”, “gather[s] the first fruits of love” (which are a little more than a kiss), and leaves again.

Talia, still soundly asleep, gives birth to twins (Sun and Moon). One of them, in search of a nipple, sucks the splinter of flax out of her finger, and she wakes up. After that, the story pretty much goes back to the Perrault plot, with fewer vipers and a better reason for the first queen to resent Talia, but at the end the wicked queen is dead, the king finally makes an honest man out of himself and marries Talia, and they live happily ever after. So here we have adultery and rape added to the mix of motifs, but hey, the story’s got a moral: “Those whom fortune favours / Find good luck even in their sleep.”

Do you still wonder why we stick with telling the Grimms’ version of the story? Pass the Sauce Robert, please.

I’ve never tasted, let alone cooked, Sauce Robert myself—it seems a fairly involved process that calls for veal stock, which is very hard to come by around here. I found a likely recipe here, if you want to give it a try.

An easier sauce that I make a lot, though, is

WHITE SAUCE or CREAM SAUCE.

It’s very versatile.

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 1 c. milk or other liquid (see below)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Steps:

• In a small saucepan, melt butter over medium-high heat.
• With a wire whisk, stir in the flour. Cook for a little while with the butter. You can even let it roast to a nice, nutty brown for more of a Sauce Robert effect.
• Pour in a 1/4 cup of the liquid.
• Whisk smooth, bring back to a bubbling. Keep adding 1/4 c. at a time, whisking smooth and letting it come back to a boil after each time.
• Season with salt and pepper
• If it's too thick for your liking, add more liquid. If you like it thicker to work as a gravy, whisk some more flour into a bit of cold liquid. Add it to the sauce and bring to a boil until it thickens.

As is, this is rather bland. However, it works as a wonderful base for all kinds of other recipes. You can even use it in place of the ubiquitous can of mushroom soup in casseroles.

Variations:

• Sauté 1/2 finely chopped onion or a crushed clove of garlic in the butter before adding the flour.
• Add powdered onion, garlic, herbs, a spoonful of mustard etc. by way of flavor.
• Add 1/2 c of grated parmesan or sharp cheddar to make a cheese sauce.
• To make cream soup, e.g. Cream of Mushroom: chop the vegetables, sauté with the butter, and proceed as before, using half stock, half milk or cream.

A mushroom cream sauce is fantastic on top of a schnitzel, preferably one made of served to in-laws. It’s known as a Hunter Schnitzel in Germany—maybe because the prince kept pretending he was going hunting when he was off to visit Beauty in the woods?

Bon Appétit,

and watch out for old ladies with spindles!

Let us know if you try this recipe!
We'd love to hear from you.

A.M. Offenwanger, contributing editor at Enchanted Conversation Magazine, is a writer, reader, blogger, and editor.

Follow her blog Amo Vitam
and on Twitter @amoffenwanger
and Facebook here

Cover Rose Photo by A.M. Offenwanger
Sleeping Beauty Cover illustration by Henry Meynell Rheam
Cover Layout by Amanda Bergloff

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