Baba Yaga is where I learned what a mortar and pestle are. We aren’t Slavic, but my mom got a book from the library about her and read it to us when I was probably in kindergarten.
I still can’t figure out why she’d try to fly in such a contraption. Also, I found her not the least bit scary.
The mortar and pestle are tools of mixing medicines and poisons. Quite ingenious actually.
The modern stories we tell children are very different from the originals. Its quite likely that none of the fairy tales you know are in their original form. Some were so deranged that there was no way to update them and were tossed down the memory hole.