St. Peter and the Farmer’s Doughnuts.

Country of Origin: Austria
Original Language: German
Published in: Sagen aus Österreich
Published by: Ueberreuter

St. Peter and the Farmer’s Doughnuts.
When our Lord still lived on earth he once wandered through the Muhlviertel (the northern part of the county Upper Austria) with St. Peter on the day of solstice. They had been walking for a long time already and St. Peter was so beset by hunger that he inquired: “Lord, I’m hungry. Don’t you think it’s time now to get something to eat?”
They were just passing a farmstead and so the Lord pointed at the house and said: “Good people live in that house. Go and ask for something to eat, they won’t turn you away.”
St. Peter went to the house and the farmer’s wife gave him three shiny hot doughnuts. He craftily thought: “One for the Lord, one for me and the third I’ll secretly keep for myself and eat it later because for my hungry stomach one donut isn’t enough.”
So they went on and ate the doughnuts. St. Peter stayed a few steps behind the Lord and as they passed through a forest he quickly pulled the third doughnut from his pocket. But each time he took a bite of it, the Lord asked him some question and because he couldn’t answer with his mouth full – as this would have given him away – he had to spit the pieces of doughnut out again. So it went on the whole time and in the end the poor apostle hadn’t eaten a single bit of his doughnut.
As it became evening, they walked the same way back and came through that forest again. To his surprise St. Peter saw, that from the moss at the wayside small yellow mushrooms had sprouted and as he asked the Lord why those mushrooms were suddenly there, the Lord looked at him and smiled.
“They have sprouted wherever you spat out bits of doughnut,” he mildly replied.
Ashamedly St. Peter realised that the Lord had seen through him. From that day on, small yellow mushrooms sprout from mossy ground around summer solstice and in memory of St. Peter’s little swindle that hadn’t remained hidden from the Lord, they have retained their doughnut-yellow colour.
Nowadays, people call them chanterelles.