Mistress Hen has a lot of worries every day. She needs to feed the chickens, take them to kindergarten, clean, iron, and prepare dinner. But how to cook something without salt? Hen goes to the neighbor Goose to borrow salt, but she asks to do her a favour. A simple request triggers a whole cascade of favours that must be arranged to get...salt. The cartoon satirically mirrors the rampant barter and blat in the poor Soviet society of the late "stagnation" era.