Cooking with Fernet Branca

By James Hamilton-Paterson

“Provokes the sort of indecorous involuntary laughter that has more in common with sneezing than chuckling. Imagine a British John Waters crossed with David Sedaris.”—The New York Times


Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he wiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions––including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur of the book’s title. Gerald’s idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic. A series of hilarious misunderstands brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Release date: Sep 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781609450953

James Hamilton-Paterson

James Hamilton-Paterson is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose books defy easy categorisation. Gerontius won the Whitbread Prize; Cooking with Fernet Branca was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His acclaimed books on the oceans, including Seven-Tenths, have been widely translated, and his books about aviation have set new standards for writing about aircraft. Born and educated in England, Hamilton-Paterson has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.

Reviews for Cooking with Fernet Branca

[dwhapax · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Quite enjoyable, with two rascally narrators.

[anne_green-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very amusing, cleverly witty and farcical. Don't read it for the recipes though as they'll possibly make you sick.

[grigoro_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very clever and hilarious story of two neighbors spending the summer in Tuscany. Gerald is a ghostwriter with a penchant for absurdly disgusting culinary creations (think of deep fried chocolate covered mussels) and Marta is an Eastern European movie soundtrack composer fleeing her overbearing Russian mob family. The book has very little plot, but the hilarious situations the characters find themselves is worth the read. The story's narration bounces back and forth between Gerald and Marta, and their preconceptions of each other is very funny.

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Cooking With Fernet Branca" by James Hamilton-Paterson is part of oddball publisher Europa Editions's sinister plot to make Murrikins like me aware of the strange and sinister world of lit'rachoor published beyond our shores. Muriel Barbery owes her Murrikin presence to them, too. We all know how *that* turned out....Well, before moving any farther along in this review process, let me send out the call: Does anyone know how to get hold of (wicked double entendre optional) actor John Barrowman? You know, Captain Jack Harkness of "Torchwood" fame? He is literally missing the key to Murrikin stardom by not reading, optioning, and making this book into a movie. It suits every single national prejudice we have: Eastern Europeans as sinister lawbreaking peasants who eat strangely shaped, colored, and named things and call them foods (like Twinkies, Cheetos, and Mountain Dew are *normal*); Englishmen as dudis (you'll have to read the book for that translation) who do eccentric off-the-wall things with food that are repulsively named and gruesomely concocted (spotted dick? bubble-and-squeak?); and Italians as supercilious effete cognoscenti of world culture, who possess the strangest *need* for vulgarity.The characters in this hilarious romp are the most dysfunctional group of misfits and ignoramuses and stereotypes ever deployed by an English-language author. They do predictable things, yet Hamilton-Paterson's deftly ironic, cruelly flensing eye and word processor cause readerly glee instead of readerly ennui to ensue. The whole bizarre crew...the lumpenproletariat ex-Soviet composer, the Italian superdirector long past his prime, the English snob who refers to Tuscany's glory as "Chiantishire" and "Tuscminster"...gyrates and shudders and clumps towards a completely foreseeable climactic explosion (heeheehee). And all the time, snarking and judging and learning to depend on each other. In the end, the end is nigh for all the established relationships and the dim, Fernet Branca-hangover-hazed outlines of the new configurations are, well, the English say it best...dire.Read it. Really, do. And I dare you not to laugh at these idiots! Don't be put off by the sheer hideousness of the American edition's cover, in all its shades-of-purple garish grisliness. The charm of reading the book is that one needn't look at that...that...illustration...on the cover, but inflict it on those not yet In The Know enough to be reading it themselves.And seriously...John Barrowman needs to know about this. Pass it on!

[x_hoxha · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Intermittently very funny. No momentum to the story, though. I had to quit two-thirds of the way through.

[jcambridge_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's been a long time since I laughed out loud within the first 10 pages of a book. This is a book that will especially appeal to anyone who has spent time in Italy...The recipes alone will make you both laugh and grimace. I recommend this as a most entertaining way to spend an afternoon reading.

[labfs39 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

And then quite suddenly she herself was back. I happened to be passing the window upstairs with a pair of binoculars when I caught sight of an unmistakable figure hanging out her laughably misnamed smalls on a washing line among the trees. The Iron Curtain's Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, although she was actually wearing her voluminous beige shift that for some reason put me in mind of a Bedouin traffic warden. I could barely contain myself for half an hour before drifting ever so casually across.Cooking with Fernet Branca is about stereotypes of all sorts: gender, nationality, social class. With its unreliable narrators and wacky humor, it challenges our assumptions about how we perceive and reflect the world around us. The novel begins with Gerald who has just moved into a mountaintop villa in Tuscany seeking solitude in which to ghost write the memoirs of pop culture figures. He loves to create wildly uneatable recipes and sings opera parodies. His only neighbor is Marta, a woman from an Eastern European country, who is also seeking solitude. She is hoping to create a life for herself composing the scores for films. As the narrative switches between the two characters, the reader becomes sucked into the stereotypes that each has about the other. Is either what they appear to be?The first part of the book had some laugh out loud funny scenes, including one involving an old privy situated on a deck, that had me in stitches. Unfortunately, the humor became less funny for me as the stereotypes became more sharply defined. The ending regained some of the beginning's charm, but by then the author had lost me. If you like this type of satirical humor, Cooking with Fernet Branca is smart and has memorable characters. I just stopped finding it as funny.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lychees on ToastIngredientsLychees (tinned)Olive oilPeanut butterHard cheeseToastAnchoviesTabasco sauceA humorous tale told alternately from the point of view of Gerald, an Englishman living who makes his living ghostwriting sportsmen's autobiographies, and his neighbour Marta, a composer from a family of gangsters from the former-USSR, who is currently working on the score for an Italian director's latest film. Each finds the other's presence irritating, as they had both hoped that the Tuscan hills would be a peaceful place to work what with the singing, piano playing, disputes over a boundary fence and helicopters arriving in the middle of the night, and suspects the other of being an alcoholic with a taste for Fernet Branca. Food is important to both of them but while Marta fills Gerry up with various stodgy monstrosities flown in from Voynovia, Gerry concocts a very strange range of gourmet recipes - I strongly suspect that his taste buds have been wired up wrongly! Neither of them would be an ideal neighbour, but Gerry would probably be worse, especially if you happened to have any pets! It's a very amusing tale.

[nickelini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gerald Sampler is an Englishman planing to hide in his quiet house in the NW corner of Tuscany to ghostwrite autobiographies of minor celebrities, mostly sports figures. Upon his arrival, he meets his newly arrived neighbour, Marta, who has escaped from "one of those vague ex-Soviet countries," where her family still lives and appear to be involved in organized crime. She composes film scores for a ....colourful .... Italian film director. Gerald and Marta clash. Gerry sings loud opera, badly, while creating outrageous recipes that involve something savoury, such as sardines, and something sweet, such as butterscotch. Endless combinations. Some of them include dubious and illegal ingredients, such as otter and Jack Russel terrier. And I learned early on the "Fernet Branca" is a disgusting herbal spirit (which I'm sure my Italian father-in-law made me sample once) that both characters drinking frequently. Silly me, on reading the title, I assumed Fernet Branca was a person. Very clever satire, mocking the fantasy "memoirs" such as Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence, and pretentious books about gourmet cooking, and satirizing a zillion other things as well. Way too many entertaining passages to quote, but if I have to pick one, I'll share his comment on Jane Austen: "Even the witty old fag-hag Jane Austen started one of her incomparable novels--was it Donna?--with the telling sentence 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a good man in possession of a wife must be in want of a tidy fortune.' And there you have it, memorably expressed." Cooking With Fernet Branca was nominated for the 2004 Booker Prize. There are two sequels: Amazing Disgrace and Rancid Pansies, which I will eventually track down. Recommended for: People with a sense of humour and who know a lot of stuff. Hamilton-Paterson packs the narrative with obscure details and goes off on many a tangent. Lots were outside my scope of knowledge and didn't mean much, but all the ones I understood were hilarious. If you're one of those people who take pride in being outside everyday culture -- especially 2004 from a Brit male POV, this novel will be gibberish. Otherwise, if you like clever, fun books, I highly recommend it.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was out in San Francisco with my husband and a friend and I saw Fernet Branca on the drinks memu. I asked the server about it and she admitted that she knew next to nothing about it, never having tasted it herself. I ordered it anyway, thinking of this book sitting on my shelves as I did so. My husband, even used to my quirks, was nonplussed by the fact that I was ordering an unknown drink based entirely on the title of a book I had not yet even read. To my mind, Fernet Branca tastes a little bit like cough syrup. So not exactly a drink I'll be ordering again any time soon. Luckily the book was significantly better than the drink and I would happily revisit Hamilton-Paterson's works again and again.This novel is an hilarious send-up of those moving and starting over travel narrative memoirs where an ex-pat moves to an exotic (usually Mediterranean) locale, restores a marvelous home, gently mocks the eccentric natives, and cooks fabulous meals with fresh local produce. Gerald and Marta are ex-pat neighbors in a small Tuscan hill village but that is where the similarities to the typical travel narratives stop. Gerald is a bit of a fussy, curmudgeonly Englishman who ghostwrites memoirs for the rich and famous (and often dissipated). He has retreated to this out of the way place so that he can write in peace and quiet. Marta is a seemingly stodgy Slav from the former Soviet-block and just about everything about her offends Gerald's sensibilities. That she is also a composer working on the movie score for a famous director's film seems to him to be a fabrication of vast proportions. But as each others' closest neighbors, they cannot escape each other and must exist in an entertaining disharmony.The narration alternates between Gerald and Marta so that the reader has the opportunity to see all of the comic misunderstandings and assumptions from both eccentric characters' perspectives. Gerald is certain he is a cook of the highest calibre and his inventive if positively ghastly dishes are all included with the text (and contain copious amounts of Fernet Branca, hence the title). Marta seems to egg the prissy, easily offended Gerald on, but she has her own quirks as well. The situations in the novel go from mundane to beyond far-fetched but by the time they get completely unbelievable, readers are already so entertained by the novel that they just laugh harder, thoroughly enjoying the ride. Witty, clever, delightfully sarcastic, and satirical this was a blast to read and I'm looking forward to the next one.

[condorena · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had put off reading this book thinking that it would be a book similar to others about people buying houses in Tuscany or France and making food and drinking wine. I was wrong. I found it to be hilarious and wonderful.

[lucybrown_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

To get an idea of this send up of the last couple decades of expat vogue, think, Tom Sharpe does Peter Mayle, and you will hit something of the right amalgam; however, I was singularly unimpressed with what others have dubbed a masterpiece. I suppose I managed a upturn of the corner of a smile here and there. Perhaps my funny bone is under the weather. Perhaps this just isn't the book for me.

[cameling_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hilarious. Simply hilarious. A Englishman buys a house in the mountains of Italy seeking quiet for his writing. He sings arias while he invents the most bizarre recipes, the products of which he sometimes shares with his aggravating neighbor, a woman from Voynovia, who generously shares bottles of Fernet Branca with him. She claims to be a musician and composer in town to compose music for a film by a famous Italian director.Their experiences of living as neighbors differ depending on who does the narration, which gives the reader the opportunity to see both sides. Humor aside, what's clear is our culture colors impressions we form of people from countries we are unfamiliar with and these impressions are often false once we get to know the other person better or start to share a language with which to better communicate.What this book is full of is humor and crazy capers. It's pure entertainment.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is essentially a comedy of mismatched neighbours on a Tuscan mountainside - an overweeningly arrogant and self-centred Brit called Gerald, in Italy to get away from the plebs, and a slightly distracted, frizzy-haired Central European called Marta, whose friendly overtures towards her neighbour are hindered by her poor English (although she is fluent in Italian and very articulate in her own language when she narrates her sections of the book). To start off with, Gerald's sections are funnier - it's his coruscating snobbishness which produces some of the best lines - but soon you realise that Marta's view of events provides an equal amount of humour, nicely puncturing Gerald's self-importance - and in any case, soon the story is bounding off in such bizarre directions that all you can do is hold on.Food and drink, in the neighbourly relationship, are both gestures of friendliness and weapons of war, with the bitter digestif Fernet Branca appearing in both categories - the latter, for example, when Gerald makes "garlic and Fernet Branca ice-cream" in hopes that it will get Marta to leave him alone.One of the running jokes of the book is Gerald's penchant for absolutely disgusting-sounding recipes, which are yet almost plausible as the final extreme of the snobbish English foodie's traditional fondness for vanishingly obscure ingredients and combinations. Another is his habit, while he works, of singing made-up Italian operetta arias fitted around phrases that he has seen on packaging (such as 'the expiry date is on the bottom of the container'). Marta's Soviet-mafia family, a celebrated but sex-obsessed Italian film director, and a British boy-band star who wants to be taken seriously, round out the storylines.All this probably sounds ridiculously over-the-top, but I think one of the most skillful things about the book is the way it leads up to its most bizarre heights gradually. I'm not saying that at the start it is absolutely true to life, but every new excess of implausibility is introduced so gently that it all seems to fit together. At every twist, too, several false leads are laid for the reader. But I only realised all this towards the end - for most of the book, I was laughing too much to do any analysis.Sample: Well, all right - I can see I'm going to have to come clean about my source of income. It's pretty humiliating but at least I can console myself with the thought that the Queen makes a living out of cutting ribbons while the Archbishop of Canterbury is paid to address the Supreme Ruler of the Universe publicly in a loud voice as if they were old friends.

[pool_boy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not much 'story' but hilariously written.

[izzynomad_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

welcome to the hilariously random world of Gerry, his cooking, and his misunderstandings with his eastern european neighbour.

[seajack_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliantly written twisted farce ... and the recipes are kinda neat, too!

[epithet_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Satarizes the starry-eyed stripe of Tuscany related travel writing. Complete with bogus recipes. The new lyrics to well known arias are very funny. A cult classic amoung my friends.

[yooperprof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Fernet Branca" is a palatable vintage that will appeal of connoissiuers of arch British wit. In a way, the novel is a parody of the new popular genre "my vacation house in sunny Tuscany/Provence/Spain." But what is most memorable in this romp is the delightfully eccentric cast of characters, which includes an effete English ghostwriter, a female composer hiding from her Balkan crime syndicate family, and a clueless New Age pop star. And the mock recipes are priceless!

[Beanca · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The type of book in which, if if was to be turned into a movie, John Cleese would be the perfect male lead.

[tadad_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The person who recommended this billed it as "pee-in-your-pants" funny. She was quite right.Gerald, ghostwriter for stars, innovative (serious understatement there!) cook lives in delightful seclusion on a Tuscan mountaintop. Moving in next door is Marta, composer of film scores, émigré from the former Soviet republic of Voyde. Both are articulate and intelligent, though a bit idiosyncratic, people—both are convinced the other is a barely literate, bibulous cretin. The resulting comedy of manners had me laughing the entire way through.Plus, for those who are on the adventurous side of the culinary world, you get the recipes for such delights as Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream, Otter with Lobster Sauce, Iced Fish Cake, and many others.

[pinkozcat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book; I giggled all the way through. It is the story of two neighbours who bought houses in a remote part of Italy with the assurance of the estate agent that the owner of 'the other house' was very quiet and was only in residence for one month of the year.Gerald is an English ghost writer for sporting heroes and Marta, a composer, is from somewhere which was previously part of the Soviet Union. It is mutual hate at first sight.What happens in the book is the accounts of both Gerald and Marta describing the same happenings, each from their own point of view.The back cover blurb:>>>Cooking with Fernet Branca is a comic bad dream of modern Italy.Gerald Samper lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. An effete and snobbish Englishman working as a ghostwriter for celebrities, he would prefer to be remembered as a gourmet. His recipes include "Mussels in Chocolate", "Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream", and a dish containing puréed prunes, rhubarb and smoked cat (off the bone).Reluctantly, Gerald shares his hillside with Marta. As far as he can see, she is a vulgar woman from a crime-ridden former Soviet republic. She is also a composer in the neo-folk style who is writing a score for a glamorous Italian film director - though Gerald can't believe it.The mutual misunderstandings of these two exiles, each in search of a crowning success in the sunlight of Tuscany, get ever more dangerous. To the music of black helicopters and bad opera, and oiled by large quantities of the bitter aperitif Fernet Branca - all that either of them ever seems to have around the house - the lives of these two unlikely neighbours gradually and disastrously intertwine ...

[pickoftheliterate · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thanks to the New York Times Book Review and the usual bounty of books for Christmas, I always seem to run into a great streak of reading early in each calendar year.This book continued the streak started with The Lost Painting. It even tied back to the Italian setting of that book, though this is a completely different effort. This novel is an intelligent farce revolving around British author Gerald Samper, a writer of second-rate biographies (tripe about race car drivers and boy-band singers) who obtains a villa in the Italian countryside to stir his creative juices. This creative streak is displayed in the vilest fashion, as he is forever offering us the most disgusting recipes imaginable: mussels in chocolate, fish cake complete with icing sugar, smoked cat, and so forth. These become increasingly execrable and almost always are spiked with a rotgut liquor called Fernet Branca.Samper’s culinary bliss is disturbed when he discovers his next-door neighbor, Marta, who he pegs as a semi-literate and drunken psycho. Just when you’re tempted to buy in to this description, the point of view shifts to Marta, and we get her very slanted view of her new neighbor. Many amusing moments and running jokes ensue. It’s kind of like a somewhat twisted travelogue novel and very entertaining.

[adzebill · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A mixed bag; two narrators, one of whom is a marvellously bizarre creation, while the other is a bit dull. Some annoyingly sloppy implausibilities in the back story too, so it didn't come together for me. But the toe-curling recipes are wonderful: "Jack Russells are an absolute bugger to bone, notoriously so, but yield a delicate, almost silky pâté that seems to welcome the careworn diner with both paws on the edge of the table, as it were....Have faith, I told myself, removing lead shot from my mouth. One never gets them all out." If only the whole book had been like this.