---
title: "Çorbacı Dedenin Çorbacı Torunu"
description: "A masal I wrote in March 2025: a soup whose recipe is a secret, a witch who wants it, and a grandfather whose real gift was refusing to explain."
date: 2025-03-14
updated: 2026-09-21
category: Arts
readingTime: "3 min read"
---


In March 2025 I wrote a masal, a Turkish folk tale, called *Çorbacı Dedenin Çorbacı Torunu*: the soup-maker grandfather's soup-maker grandson. It was published in a story book. I am not putting the full text here, because it belongs in that book. What follows is what happens in it, and then why I wrote it.

## What happens

It opens the way masals open, with a *tekerleme*: the run of nonsense patter that carries you from your chair to the country the story takes place in. Camels playing ball, roosters working as town criers, fleas as porters. Except that partway through, mine stops being nonsense. Goats found a village, a wolf becomes its headman, and the wolf takes rather more than he is offered, until he overreaches and chokes on it.

Then the story proper. In a distant land there is a grandfather who has kept his family by making soup since he was young. The soup is famous far beyond his own country and people queue from other lands for it, because the recipe he guards is like nothing else in the world. It heals the sick, opens the ears of musicians and the eyes of painters, and gives poets their lines back. Kings have asked him for it. So have fairies, giants and djinn. He has never given it to any of them.

One afternoon a witch comes into the shop, sits down, and tells him he will hand over the recipe or never see daylight again. He refuses and throws her out. She goes home and curses him, and he falls into a sleep he does not wake from.

His grandson opens the shop the next morning, because somebody has to. He has helped there for years and he can cook, and what he makes is genuinely good soup, one of the best in the land. It is not the same. A regular customer takes one spoonful and knows, and cannot say what is wrong: not the taste, he says, not the smell, not the temperature, but something is missing and he has no name for it.

That evening the boy's mother asks him a question rather than giving him an answer. Did you make it the way your grandfather did, with all of your love in it?

The next day he cooks with that in the pot, and the shop has the busiest day in its history; his friends come to help him serve. Walking home, he reasons his way to the rest of it. If love is the strongest bond there is, perhaps it is strong enough to break a witch's curse. He makes the soup again, carries it to his grandfather's bedside, and his grandfather wakes.

And then the grandfather explains what he whispered to his daughter on the last night: do not tell the boy the real ingredient. He will work out that the secret was already inside him.

If you would like to read the whole thing, [email me](/contact) and I will send it to you.

---

## Three notes on the story

**The opening gives the plot away.** The wolf demands, takes more than he is offered, overreaches, chokes. So does the witch. The whole shape of the story is laid out in the patter before the story starts, in the one register where a reader will not think to look for it.

I did not plan that. The tekerleme rhymes internally, and once you are inside that kind of rhyming you start reaching for pairs to keep it going. Every pair I reached for turned out to be about taking more than you were given, which I suppose says something about what was already on my mind.

**Something is missing and nobody can name it.** The customer who takes one spoonful and knows, and cannot say what is wrong, is the only page I would not change.

I wrote it at fifteen as a scene about craft, and it is a good scene about craft: nobody can tell you what is absent from your work, only that something is. I have since spent a whole post on [the Turkish word for a lack you cannot itemise](/blog/noksan).

**The grandfather refuses to explain on purpose.** The last thing he says is that he told his daughter to withhold the recipe: *do not tell him, he will work out that the secret is already inside him.* So the withholding is the teaching. He is not protecting a recipe, he is protecting a discovery, because an answer handed over is worth less than the same answer arrived at.

That is the part I did not consciously construct and would defend anyway. A story about a secret recipe whose moral is that the recipe cannot be handed over, only arrived at, is at least arguing with its own genre rather than repeating it.