Alison Richards writes about culinary delights and horrors in the Grimms’ fairy tales.

What I wasn’t quite prepared for was all the culinary horror that goes along with this fairy tale deliciousness. Forget about edible houses, magic apples, and winter strawberries. Young women and small children are just as likely to top the menu. Variously gulped down whole, fattened for roasting, neatly sliced for serving, or cut up into stew.

In the story “The Robber Bridegroom,” the gruesome kitchen prep is the final stage of what can only be described as a gang rape. A band of drunken thieves drag home a young woman, force her to drink three full glasses of wine “one white, one red, one yellow,” tear off her clothes, and finally, they “chopped her beautiful body into pieces, and sprinkled them with salt.”

“The Juniper Tree” goes even further. A wicked stepmother kills her husband’s young son so that their daughter will inherit everything. In order to conceal the hideous crime, she chops up the little boy’s body and turns him into a pot of stew. When his father returns home, he tucks into a hearty meal. “Oh, dear wife, this stew tastes so good!” he declares. And then he demands a second helping.

And almost as bad as the prospect of becoming dinner is the prospect of having no dinner at all — many of these stories are haunted by the specter of hunger. It’s famine and despair that sets the whole plot machinery of Hansel and Gretel in motion. Mothers threaten to eat or abandon their own children because there is no food. Outside of the palace or noble house, people survive on a meager diet of bread, roots and herbs with the occasional egg or apple. Step children and outcasts get dry crusts and whatever they can forage.

http://www.nhpr.org/post/brothers-original-fairy-tales-offer-grimm-menu