Rumple-What?

I watch Top Chef as much as I can. Here, it is aired on free tv quite late. Top Chef Las Vegas had its finale about a month back with reruns airing in the meantime hopefully before picking up Top Chef Masters 2. I don't think the recently finished Top Chef Washington DC will be aired this year. Other than books I love food, you see. And it is fascinating to watch those chefs create meals in a time-pressured environment where other chefs of notoriety or renown (haha), taste and pass judgment ala-Simon Cowell on food. It sounds like a nice gig, really. You get to eat and wonder at the brains behind the chefs in the kitchen. Me, I just watch. If you ask the very basic cake recipe from me I'll come up with nothing. I need a recipe book propped open before I create something remotely tasty.

I'm not here to talk about food, really. There's just this one favorite challenge of mine in the Las Vegas season, the one where Penn and Teller (yes, the magicians) appeared as guests. The chefs were asked to deconstruct a favorite American dish and it was exciting to see the chefs come up with imaginative ways to like, deconstruct a lasagna. Or pot roast. In the present season (Top Chef Washington DC), they had a somewhat similar challenge called Covert Cuisine where the chefs were asked to disguise a commonly known dish into something else. Why this talk about disguise and deconstruction? Simple. The story I picked for my Short Story Peril this week is a well-known fairy tale in disguise.

On Lickerish Hill is the second story in Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories. And it's quite difficult to read. I mean, it feels like I'm reading a very old English text. It was only sometime in the middle of the story when I put the pieces together and realized that this is a retelling of Rumplestiltskin. Did I even spell that right? I won't say it three times. Oh wait, I'm not calling the Bogeyman.

Miranda Sowreston relates in her journal the events leading to her marriage with the melancholic Sir John Sowreston, who was led to believe Miranda could spin five skeins of flax in a day for a month. About a year after they were married, Sir John put Miranda in a cell to demand his spun threads.

The thing I had difficulty here isn't actually the text but uh, well for one thing how the women are treated. It was good that Miranda gets to talk with the scholars and all, all visitors of her husband, but gee, putting your wife in a cell and threatening her with death isn't exactly the proper way to treat one's spouse. It's just a story, I know. And it's not like the original had a judicious leading man in the first place. Still, I never even liked the original story to begin with.

But this one was well-written. If this were a Top Chef dish it would get great points for disguising the tale until sometime in the middle of the story. Then again I should have picked up on it much earlier. There were clues, you see. I was just a teeny wee bit slow that day. Hahaha.

Still, for my hands down favorite deconstructed fairy tale of all time, nothing beats Snow Glass Apples from Neil Gaiman. You should listen to the audio version of that in Two Plays for Voices. Far creepier. Hahaha.