Clever Gretel

A cook named Gretel, known for tasting her own cooking a bit too enthusiastically, prepared two fine roast chickens for her master and his expected dinner guest. While waiting for the guest to arrive, she tasted just one small piece to check the seasoning — then another, and another, until, before she quite realized it, she had eaten one entire chicken.

Panicking as the guest's arrival approached, she came up with a clever excuse: she told her master the guest was taking unusually long, and perhaps he intended to cut off her ear as punishment for delay, since he had been sharpening his knife so intently at the door — a total fabrication meant to frighten the confused guest into fleeing before he could ask about the missing chicken.

The guest, alarmed by her whispered "warning" and the master's sharpened knife, fled without explanation. Gretel then told her equally confused master that the guest had simply grabbed a chicken and run off with it before he could stop him. Both men, each confused by half the story and neither knowing the other's half, accepted their separate partial truths, and Gretel escaped consequences entirely, feasting privately on evidence no one would ever fully piece together.