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Stone Soup: Three Cookbooks For Lean Times

I'm sure you know the story of the hungry beggar who arrives in a miserly village with nothing but a kettle. He drops an ordinary stone in the kettle, adds some water and calls it "stone soup".

"It's delicious!" he cries to the gathering crowd. "Now if only I had an onion ..."

One by one, the villagers part with their produce — and their miserly ways. Before long, the pretend soup has become a real one: savory, aromatic and generous enough to feed the entire town.

It's a good story for lean times like these. Fact is, the miracle of dinner is an ordinary one — and these three books make it easy to conjure up mouthwatering meals from the most unmagical of ingredients.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

T. Susan Chang
T. Susan Chang regularly writes about food and reviews cookbooks for The Boston Globe, NPR.org and the Washington Post. She's the author of A Spoonful of Promises: Recipes and Stories From a Well-Tempered Table (2011). She lives in western Massachusetts, where she also teaches food writing at Bay Path College and Smith College. She blogs at Cookbooks for Dinner.