Hungarian Folk Tales: The King's Bread
The king in this tale was tired of eating chicken, and noodles, and cake,
and milk, and bread and other sweet treats every day.
And so he issued an order that he should be served an extraordinary dish
that he had never eaten before, but that it should be delicious.
Well, the king's cook thought:
I will do my very best!
And the cook carried one spectacular dish after the last to the king's dining table.
The cook tried all he could imagine:
eggs with honey, pork with sugar, fish with cream and walnuts baked in milk.
But all to no avail as the king was not impressed and pushed each away with a look of disgust.
No sooner had the cook placed the thirteenth dish before the king, when he roared:
Enough!
If you fail to bring me a dish I have never tasted,
I shall have your head cut off.
So the poor cook returned to the kitchen feeling sad.
He thought and thought but he simply could not think of anything clever to cook for the king.
He could almost feel the executioner's axe on the back of his neck.
With no idea of what to cook, he took a loaf of bread and ran away from the royal palace.
When time came for supper the following day, the king sat at his table
as he always did, but no dish was served before him.
This had never happened in the palace before,
and the king summoned for the cook to be brought before him bound in chains.
But where was the royal cook?
They searched the palace high and low but he was nowhere there.
So then the king's carver said to the king:
Your majesty, I have to tell you that the cook has run away.
The king was furious.
No supper, and now no cook!
Was he the only man in the land to sit before a bare table when it was time to eat?
So the king ordered his guards to saddle their horses
and he led them out of the palace on horseback, furious and famished.
They set out after the cook soon found his trail,
and rode until they came to a great forest.
Here they searched low and high until they sighted him atop a tree,
and the king shouted up:
Come down, you wretch!
Or I shall shoot!
But the cook decided not to move, and pretended to be dead, held aloft by the tree strong branches.
So the king called his men to chop the tree down.
But the guards worked as slowly as they could, because they all liked the cook very much indeed;
and they felt sad for his sorry faith.
The king would surely have the cook's head cut off and they would be sorry to see him go.
Because he had the habit of giving them delicious tidbits that the king ignored.
And the roast pork and chicken always made an excellent change to their daily ration of bread.
The king soon saw that the guards were slacking and the tree would never be chopped down.
Then the king's cook became so frightened by all the chopping
that he dropped the loaf of bread he carried and it fell to the foot of the tree.
The king saw the loaf and wondered what on earth it could be?
It is a loaf of bread, sire, and not for a king but a poor man's food.
The king broke a little off and tasted it.
Oh, I've never eaten such delicious food since I was a baby in my mother's arms.
You rogue, you never told me that you could cook food as delicious as this loaf of bread.
Come down and I shall pardon you for all your sins.
The king's cook now knew that he was safe.
And so he climbed down the tree and stood before his sovereign.
Cook, I order you that from now on whatever you serve on my royal table,
must be accompanied by bread.