Folk tales from different parts of Switzerland relate the dire consequences of refusing bread to the poor. Thus one wicked knight was turned into stone when he turned away a woman who asked for bread, and another was buried under a rockfall for the same reason.

It was usually the rich and powerful who came to sticky ends. A rich farmer's wife was doing her baking one Christmas Eve, when a hungry child came trudging through the snow and knocked at her door asking for bread.

Rather than let him see how much she had already baked, she made him wait outside while she put a small amount of dough in the oven for him. But when she opened the oven door, the loaf had grown so big that she decided to keep it, and broke off a yet smaller piece of dough for the child. The same thing happened again. She heard the boy weeping outside.

"Why are you so impatient?" she asked angrily. "You're just sitting there while other people are working."

"I'm weeping for you," was the reply.

She thought nothing of it, except that the child was not quite right in the head. Then she put a mere thimbleful of dough in the oven, and this time when she opened it up she found the loaf was still growing. And it grew and grew and filled the kitchen and filled the house, and only stopped once it had covered the whole building and everything inside - including the farmer's hardhearted wife.