Pots with handles, pots with covers, pots with legs
Even the mountain did its share. For besides giving the giants a home, it kept up a fire that never went out over which they cooked their porridge. It was at any rate a rather unusual mountain. Instead of being rough and craggy and rising to a sharp, uncomfortable point, it was smooth and green, and the top was hollowed out in a wide, deep bowl. Right in the middle of the bowl was the spot, some forty feet across, that served as the giants’ stove. No matter how it snowed, no matter how it rained, no matter how the wind blew, that spot was always red hot, glowing with the great fire shut up inside the mountain.
Pots for boiling, pots for stewing
Many a cook might have envied Grosshand. All he had to do was to set the porridge on the stove and turn peacefully over to snore the night out. In the morning, the minute the giants blinked their eyes open, there would be their porridge steaming up into the sunlight ready to be eaten. After breakfast his task was no harder. He had but to put on more porridge, and be off with his brothers for the fun of the day. At night when they came wading wearily back, down the river Rhine, they would see, miles off, the gust of smoke against the sunset that meant a hot supper at home. And so they were soon fed when they were hungry, and no one could ever complain that the meals were late.
Pots for frying
In fact there would have been nothing at all to grumble about had it not been for the pots. Now, any one who had looked into the giants’ cupboard would have thought it well equipped indeed. There were big pots and little pots, deep pots and shallow pots, wide pots and narrow pots, iron pots and brass pots, pots with handles, pots with covers, pots with legs, pots for boiling, pots for frying, pots for stewing, and just plain pots.
The trouble was that all the pots, big and little, wide and narrow, deep and shallow, spread out on the stove together, held scarcely enough porridge for the giants’ breakfast. Then too, the pots were getting old. They had been handed down for generations in the giants’ family, and as every one of them had been used every day for more years than you could count, they began gradually from sheer old age to wear out.