The Witches: 9. The Recipe Summary & Analysis

While the Grand High Witch outlined her devious plan, the boy was frozen in place behind the folding screen, listening—and hoping that in all the excitement, the witches won’t smell him or otherwise discover him. Suddenly, there’s some excitement. A few witches have spotted a pair of mice, and they think the Grand High Witch has arranged a demonstration. With a start, the boy realizes that William and Mary have run off. The Grand High Witch immediately realizes that they’re pet mice, too, but she doesn’t bother to question how they got into the room. Concluding that they must belong to a boy staying at the hotel, she promises to deal with the unfortunate child later, after she’s taught the audience the recipe for her potion.

The potion begins by boiling the wrong end of a telescope for 21 hours. Meanwhile, the potion-brewer should fry the tails of 45 brown field mice in hair oil, while simultaneously simmering the mice in frog juice for one hour. The delayed action part is the trickiest, but this can be accomplished by setting an alarm clock for 9 o’clock tomorrow morning, roasting it in an oven until it’s crisp and tender, and throwing it into a blender with the mice, mouse tails, and telescope end. Then it’s just a matter of adding common witchy ingredients like a gruntle egg, crrrabcrrruncher claw, blabbersnitch beak, grrobblesqvirt snout, and catsprrringer tongue to the mix. One drop of the potion will have the intended effect. The Grand High Witch warns her audience to avoid overdosing children at all costs, because then they might not turn into mice at the right moment.