Halfway down a well and into another world, a girl passes a baker's oven and the loaf inside calls out to her. In Grimm's Household Tales (collected 1812–1857; this translation 1884), the industrious step-daughter, set each day by the well to "spin and spin till her fingers bled" and then sent down after the fallen shuttle, wakes in "a lovely meadow" and walks until she reaches "a baker's oven full of bread", and "the bread cried out", begging her to "take me out" before it should burn, for it has "been baked a long time". She lifts every loaf out "with the bread-shovel" and goes on — soon to shake a tree of ripe apples that begs the same, and to serve old Mother Holle, whose shaken featherbed lets snow fall on the earth.

The speaking loaf is a small test, and the tale keeps the account. The girl who heeds it earns a shower of golden rain at Mother Holle's door; her idle step-sister, who later passes the same oven and refuses — "As if I had any wish to make myself dirty" — comes home coated in pitch instead. The whole record filed for the speaking bread is this one German tale, and it is served entire, so the loaf's cry stands without corroboration or contradiction. Why does the oldest way to test a heart put the words in the mouth of a loaf, and ask only to be noticed?