Cooking with Fernet Branca

By James Hamilton-Paterson

“A very funny sendup of Italian-cooking-holiday-romance novels” (Publishers Weekly).

Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he whiles 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 known as Fernet Branca. But Gerald’s idyll is about to be shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic, as a series of misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity . . .

“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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• 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.

Book preview

GERALD

1.

If you will insist on arriving at Pisa airport in the summer you will probably have to fight your way out of the terminal build­ing past incoming sun-reddened Brits, snappish with clinking luggage. They are twenty minutes late for their Ryanair cheapo return to Stansted ("I said carry your sister’s bloody bag, Crispin, not drag it. If we miss this flight your life won’t be worth living…). Ignoring them and once safely outside, you can retrieve your car in leisurely fashion from the long-term park and hit the northbound motorway following the Genova" signs. Within a mere twenty minutes you are off again at the Viareggio exit. Don’t panic: you are not destined for the beach which stretches its tottering crop of sun umbrellas like poison-hued mushrooms for miles of unexciting coastline. No. You are heading safely inland through the little town of Camaiore.

Abruptly the road starts to climb into the Apuan Alps: great crags and slopes thick with chestnut forest and peaks the colour of weathered marble–which is mostly what they are. After some tortuous hairpins you will come to the village of Casoli, whose apparent surliness is probably owing to its having watched outlying portions of itself disappear into the valley below every few years in winter landslides. Carry on through and up. More forest, broken at the hairpins by spec­tacular views. Restored stone houses with Alpine fripperies tacked on (shutters with heart-shaped holes) and Bavarian-registered BMWs parked outside. Keep going: the world is still sucking at your heels but you are leaving it behind. Up and up, until even the warbling blue Lazzi buses are deterred and turn round in a specially asphalted area. Not far beyond is what looks like a cart track. Follow this for a hundred metres and you will come upon an area known as Le Rocce and the house I have rashly bought. Even more rashly, I am trying to make it habitable while at the same time attempting to earn a living by writing a commissioned book too ludi­crous for further mention. The view, though, is amazing. As we British are so fond of saying, the three most important things about a house are Position, Position and Position. (For some reason Americans call it location.) The British say this with a wise smile, as if imparting an original insight culled from years of experience and reflection rather than repeating a stale piece of businessman’s wisdom they have heard in a dozen pubs. Whatever you think of this particular house, you have to admit it’s got Position coming out of its ears. Apart from a portion of stone roof barely visible through the trees some way off, there is solitude in every direction.

You’re not tired from your journey? Well, I am; so I set about preparing a little something suited to what will be the grand panorama from the terrace once the prehistoric privy overhanging the gulf has been removed. Great swathes of mountainside. Between them, lots of blue air with circling buzzards and a distant view of Viareggio and the sea. On a clear day the small island of Gorgona is visible; on a really clear day, I’m told, Corsica. So what shall it be? Something at once marine and disdainful, I fancy, to show how much we care for local frutti di mare and how little for rented beach umbrellas and ice creams. Here we are, then: 

Mussels in Chocolate

You flinch? But that’s only because you are gastronomically unadventurous. (Your Saturday evening visits to the Koh-i-Noor Balti House do not count. These days conveyor-belt curry is as safe a taste as Mozart.)

Ingredients

2 dozen fresh mussels, shelled and cleaned

Good quantity olive oil

Rosemary

Soy sauce

100 gm finely grated Valrhona dark chocolate

You will need quite a lot of olive oil because you are going to deep-fry the mussels, and no, that bright green stuff claiming to be Extra-Special First Pressing Verginissimo olive oil with a handwritten parchment label isn’t necessary. Anyway, how can there possibly be degrees of virginity? Olive oil snobs are even worse than wine snobs. You’re far better off, not least financially, with ordinary local stuff that has been cut in the traditional fashion with maize oil, machine oil, green dye etc. Heat this until small bubbles appear (before it begins to seethe). Toss in a good handful of fresh rosemary. Meanwhile, dunk each mussel in soy sauce and roll it in the bitter chocolate. (Unlike the oil, the choco­late must be of the best possible quality. If it even crosses your mind to use Cadbury’s Dairy Milk you should stop reading this book at once and give it to a charity shop. You will learn nothing from it.) Put the mussels in the deep-fryer basket and plunge them into the oil. Exactly one minute and fifty seconds later lift them out, drain them on kitchen paper and shake them into a bowl of pale porcelain to set off their rich mahogany colour. Listen to how agreeably they rustle! Most people are surprised by their sound, which is not unlike that of dead leaves in a gutter. This is because of the interesting action of soy sauce on chocolate at high temper­atures. Now pour yourself a cold glass of Nastro Azzurro beer and, mussels to hand, find a seat from which the privy can’t be seen. Gaze out over your domain and reflect on the Arrivals queue at Stansted airport where even now the mul­ish Crispin is taking it out on his sister by treading down the backs of her trainers. Enjoy.

2.

The day has dawned bright in every sense and I am making good progress up a ladder painting the kitchen—the most important room in the house—in contrasting shades of mushroom and eau de Nil. Anyone can do the white-walls-and-black-beams bit, but it takes aesthetic confidence and an original mind to make something of a Tuscan mountain farmhouse that isn’t merely Frances Mayes. It also takes a complete absence of salt-of-the-earth peasants and their immemorial aesthetic input. It is all rather heartening and as I work I break cheerfully into song. I have been told by friendly cognoscenti that I have a pleasant light tenor, and I am just giving a Rossini aria a good run for its money when suddenly a voice shouts up from near my ankles: Excuse, please. I am Marta. Is open your door, see, and I am come. I break off at tutte le norme vigenti and look down to find a shock of frizzy hair with an upturned sebaceous face at its centre.

This is ominous, but I descend with an exemplary display of patience. Michelangelo, busy with Adam’s finger on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, would have been similarly miffed to be told he was wanted on the phone. The stocky lady is apolo­getic and claims to be my neighbour, feels strongly we should be acquainted, has come bearing an ice-breaking bottle of Fernet Branca. My heart sinks during these explanations and still further as I find myself sitting at the table sniffing cautiously at the Fernet, a drink whose charm is discreeter even than that of the bourgeoisie, being black and bitter. I’d always thought people only ever drank it for hangovers. Seeing no way out I admit to being Gerald Samper while refraining from adding One of the Shropshire Sampers, which, while true, would obviously be wasted on her. I disturb, says Marta confidently as I cast my eyes towards the unfinished ceiling. No, no, I lie feebly. One can always do with a break. I am kicking myself for having underestimated the threat posed by that glimpse of stone roof some way off. Months ago my specious little agent, Signor Benedetti, told me it belonged to a house lived in only for a month each year by a mouse-quiet foreigner. Having made sure he didn’t mean a fellow Briton I dismissed the whole matter and, indeed, had practically forgotten that my splendid tranquil­lity might be compromised by a neighbour.

What can I say now about this person who, during most of a long, hot summer and for much of the ensuing long, hot autumn, becomes the principal bane of my life, or primo pesto, as I expect they say in Chiantishire? In this role Marta faces formidable competition from Italian bureaucrats and enforcers of building regulations, but she outclasses them easily. I gather she comes from somewhere in that confused area between the Pripet Marshes and the Caucasus. My ignorance of geog­raphy, I ought to point out, knows no bounds and hence no frontiers.

Is that Poland? I hazard.

Marta looks profoundly shocked.

Er… Belarus?

She thumps the table. Her bangles jangle.

Sort of Latvia way? I try despairingly.

She fixes me with large dark eyes which, I now notice, have fragments of glittery material adhering to their upper lids. No, she says fiercely, I am Voyde, puremost of blood. Yes! We of Voynovia are Christians when Slavs and Russians still barbars much more even than today. I tell you history. Many five hundred years…

I tune out at this point, staring sadly at my empty glass and feeling the paint splashes drying on my arms. In a kind of rueful dull rage I curse myself for weakness. Who but an over-mannerly British gent would allow himself to be inter­rupted in the middle of painting a ceiling in order to be harangued in his own kitchen by a perfect stranger speaking abominable English? Weak, weak, weak. Well, this time the worm is going to turn. I am regrettably going to have to take a very firm hand with Marta, if only she will stop talking. Fragments of her speech snag my attention, like carrier-bags floating down the River Vistula. Apparently Voynovia is one of those enclaves that was on the fringes of the Holy Roman Empire and ruled for centuries by Margraves or Electors or something, clinging to its ethnic identity through thick and thin: thick being represented by the Soviet era and thin by the post-Soviet era. The more Marta talks, the more I can see every excuse for those unsung Margraves’ despotism. I wish to acquaint her with knouts.

So we will becoming close here, you and me, she is saying. "I love you British queens and kings tradition. I want to learn. I want to learn you all of Voynovia, the fooding number one of all. Voynovian fooding best in all Europa, best in all of world. Is… mm. She kisses her fingertips in a frightful ges­ture probably copied from a Maurice Chevalier film. But you will learn me other things, yes, Gerree?"

For a chill moment I imagine her voice suggests a leer, then reject this as absurd. I am surely not especially good-looking, although discerning people naturally recognize that a certain refinement of manner and mind can more than compensate for a trivial lack of Adonis-like qualities. I scarcely think this frizzy-haired frump slurping Fernet Branca at my kitchen table at ten o’clock in the morning is even on nodding terms with refinement.

Tonight you will come at dinner.

Oh, no, er… I hear myself temporizing. I am thinking of the treat I have promised myself—a dish of poached salmon with wild cherry sauce which I modestly claim is not the least successful of my little inspirations. No, perhaps not tonight.

OK, tomorrow, she says with the implacability of a JCB sinking its scoop in a trench. You may bringing your wife. It is her parting shot. This time there can be no doubt about the leer, which lingers on the air behind her like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. She obviously doesn’t believe I have a wife. And why not, might I ask? I could easily have one. At any moment during the past hour a wholesome creature like Felicity Kendal in The Good Life could have wandered down the stairs, spattered with distemper, to counter the Fernet with a bottle of home-made nettle wine. It is entirely presumptuous of Marta to make such an airy assumption.

I wearily pick up the paintbrush which has stiffened into a birch-twig besom. As I climb back up the ladder I notice that quite half the contents of the bottle she brought have gone. Rather disgusting, the way she tucked into her own present. I resume painting. It is hot up here and the ceiling seems to sway a little. I do not at all feel like singing now. The truth is, this neighbourly intrusion has had an upsetting effect on me and I really feel I shall have to go and lie down. This I do; and such is the strain that Marta’s visit has produced in me that I fall unconscious for several hours and awake with a headache to find much of the day has vanished. I fully intended to give the recipe for my salmon-in-cherries dish here because like any true creative artist I am eager for a little sliver of immor­tality. But alas the moment has passed and immortality will have to be postponed.

3.

Next morning I awake in a spirit of mischief, more than a lit­tle goaded by the thought of having let myself in for dinner with the ghastly Marta while under the influence of Fernet Branca. Being properly brought up, I’m unable to go out even on unwelcome social occasions without bearing a gift of sorts, so I shall have to think of something. Thank goodness I’m going by myself. Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each per-son is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Bethlehem would probably have sprung for a box of After Eights. Three Magi on the same trip found themselves laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh and bit­terly contemplating their overdrafts.

So to the mischief. What shall it be? Rossini—come to my aid! And he does, bless him. Only a few bars into Vedi la data indicata I remember he was himself an excellent cook who invented several original dishes (Tournedos Rossini being only one) and had a predilection for ice cream. Ice cream, eh? It being hot in Tuscany in late June, even up here in the mountains, I reason one can’t go far wrong bearing home-made ice cream to a dinner. I further reason that Marta requires something punitive to remind her not to make a habit of these neighbourly invitations. So what better than

Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream

Ingredients

15 large cloves of garlic

150 gm granulated sugar

4 tablespoons cold double cream

1/4 pint Fernet Branca

Put the garlic and the sugar into a blender and empty over them the remains of a bottle of Fernet Branca with paint splashes on its label. This will yield a curious compound the colour of Iodex, which older readers will remember as an embrocation made from seaweed extract that sporty school-boys used to rub on their little stiffnesses. Whip the cream, but only until it starts to thicken. Then stir in the Iodex mix­ture. An attractive tawny shade emerges while the garlic note brings tears to the eyes. Excellent. Pot it and leave in the fridge for an hour. Then turn it into your ice cream freezer and proceed as usual. When going out to dinner with someone you would be relieved to learn had died during the course of the day, remove the ice cream as you leave the house. It will have the consistency of a brick but by 10 p.m. will have softened just enough to become the evening’s pièce d’occasion. If after that she ever invites you round again, you are in very much worse trouble than you thought. Oh, and a spray of fennel embedded in the surface looks well.

By now I am in an ice cream sort of mood so with the fen­nel right to hand on the chopping board I knock up a batch of Fennel and Strawberry Ice Cream for myself. This particular glace à la Samper is definitely one of my entries for the immor­tality stakes. It is a sensational combo and I urge you to try it out on friends and make them guess what it is. They may think of Pernod because of the aniseedy taste, yet if you do make Pernod and Strawberry Ice Cream it tastes quite differ­ent. Fennel and Strawberry actually tastes green, while look­ing puce (use the stalks and foliage rather than the bulb).

All these preparations have made the morning whiz by. Marta’s fault, of course. Not only did she cause me to lose most of yesterday but much of today has now vanished on her behalf. A light lunch is called for, with a pause for reflec­tion. This leads to the discovery that the kitchen ceiling is still not finished so at two o’clock I reluctantly pick up my brushes and once more drag myself up the ladder. It is appallingly hot up there among the beams and rafters and it takes all my resolve not to have a little nap and wait for it to cool down. But being made of stern stuff I doggedly paint on until, by around five-thirty, the ceiling is finished and resplendent. The work has also had the effect of making me feel entirely on top of the Marta situation. You know how it is with DIY and circular thought. Either an irritating fragment of tune keeps repeating itself in time with your brush strokes or else you become fixed into long, protesting sorts of argu­ment with absent people. The increasing acerbity of these one-sided conversations is surely due to fury at having to waste yet more hours of one’s rapidly dwindling stock of time on a job one would cheerfully pay a menial to do if only one had the money. In any case, by the time the ceiling is finished I have inwardly shown Marta the door out of my life some sixty-three times. Sometimes she went with a set, tense face and at other times she flew out in a storm of tears and hair. In every case, though, she left. Somewhere in the middle of these harangues I remembered another ingredient that I might have included in tonight’s ice cream. Bullied cooks, from the grandest hotels to army cookhouses, are traditionally rumoured to include various bodily secretions in the food as a way of asserting themselves and having the last laugh. I can quite see that a glimpse through the kitchen door of some sniffy old tyrant in bombazine tucking into a beauti­ful creamy mayonnaise that contains a dash of one’s own sperm could well bring satisfaction. However, for the moment Marta is safe. Poor woman–I only wish to discour­age her. Such excesses will be held in abeyance for use only when the situation has degenerated considerably.

At seven-thirty on the dot I present myself at her back door bearing my patent (and uncontaminated) ice cream.

"Gerree!" she squeals in welcome. Her abbreviation of my name is something else I am going to have to correct PDQ. Meanwhile she plants Voynovian kisses on both my cheeks and forehead, leaving a dreadful smell. She must have bought her cologne off a barrow in Viareggio. It is the exact female equivalent of Brut aftershave and I have to go and wash it off immediately on the pretext that the ice cream container has made my hands sticky. When I return to her kitchen she presses not a mere glass but a stoup of Fernet Branca into my hands and folds my nerveless fingers around it.

4.

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. In comparison with them, being a successful ghostwriter for sporting heroes seems positively intellectual.

How I came to take up this career is not a long story but it’s a very sad one, so I shan’t tell it. As for the books themselves, things get steadily worse. My present commission is definitely grislier than the previous one, which was the autobiography I wrote for a recent downhill skiing champion. It is grislier even though the procedure remains identical. Their agents fix it up, you see. All I have to do is follow these champions around trying to get them to talk sense for ten minutes at a stretch in between their practice sessions, advertisement shoots, maga­zine interviews and copulations. The most ironic phrase in this ghosting business is in-depth. In order to talk to the skier I had to hang around the foyers of chalet-style hotels in places like Klosters and somewhere in Colorado whose name slips my memory. That was bad enough, given Glühwein and raclette, but young Luc turned out to be the sort of person who actually wore the brands he advertised. Can you imagine someone who believes his own endorsements? He was always festooned with chunky action watches and après-ski outfits in nonexistent colours with his own name on them. I kept want­ing to tell him that at school even I had been obliged to wear clothes bearing my own name but we had been well-enough bred to have the tags sewn on inside. In addition he wore an aftershave that made me faint, something I had never done before. His manager put it down to the heat in the room.

Anyway, it was grim, although the resultant book sold very well indeed. This was partly because I invented for this skier an aphrodisiac to account for his legendary off-piste (and several times on-piste) behaviour. The recipe is now too well-known for me to repeat here. All I will say is that Luc Bailly eventually came to believe that this potion was indeed the secret of his prowess. Inevitably, he consumed so much it brought on gravel and the end of his career. But at his peak he did have sensational thighs that ballooned out above the silly little knees that skiers have, worn to mere bony hinges with all that flexing.

Yet as I said, my present job has turned out even worse. The subject is the thrice World Champion Formula One racing driver Per Snoilsson, better known as The Flying Swede, if you can visualize such a thing. Snoilsson is a vicious young man who unquestionably caused the death of François Bidet at Monaco two years ago when the Flying Frenchman sailed off into the harbour, stopped flying abruptly and drowned in his cockpit right beneath the keel of a standby rescue launch. (Very sad. Charming smile.) All Snoilsson got was a caution and some points knocked off, which didn’t matter a jot to him since he had a lead of forty championship points over his nearest rival, who by a strange chance happened to be François Bidet.

Apart from being vicious Per is a consummate cretin. How could it be otherwise when he makes a living out of driving round in circles at breakneck speed? Still, I would rather he didn’t kill himself until after my book comes out. Then we can have an updated memorial edition with pictures of the fatal crash. Those really sell, probably because the tragic thing about modern motor racing is that fatalities are becoming all too rare. In any case, we have now had six sessions together and I have learned all there is to know about young Per that is printable. No sense in going on milking the same cow in the hope that one day it will fill your pail with champagne. Our sessions included one in a private jet and another in a factory on an industrial estate near Weybridge where he sat in a puddle of chemical foam to make a mould of his hardbitten little bum, surely the first time it had ever made any sort of impression. They said it was for a driving seat. I ask you. Anyway, my job is to turn all our taped sessions into a book, hence my need to buy a remote, quiet house with a view and access to some good delicatessens. I’ve already written practically all of it; over the next week I just need to come up with a good title. Oh dear, oh dear, these are not ironic people. The more brainless a book’s intended readership, the more rib-nudgingly cute the title has to be. Christmas shoppers—the trade my publisher brazenly aims at—prefer titles they can relate to, in the words of the editor. "What you want is a Life in the Fast Lane sort of thing," she suggested with her usual deadpan originality. Obviously, most of these gruelling clichés have long since been used for the autobiographies of previous world champions and one has to hunt around for leftovers. Off the top of my head (as we say in the trade) I proposed The Absolute Pits and Pistons at Dawn and was a little hurt by how coolly they were received. Maybe they, too, have already been used. Ever since the factory episode when I was able to observe young Per and an even younger mechanic moulding each other’s bottoms I have thought of him as The Chequered Fag, and this is now my working title.

It’s not that I’m snobbish about these sports personalities, you understand. Not in the least. They, too, have a living to make. No, I’m sceptical about the leech industry that clings to them and demands biographies of people who are far too young to have done any real living yet. How can you make someone of twenty-four sound interesting when nothing has happened to him except years of punishing training super-vised by a ruthless parent? These kids are just money-spinning automata whom beady people have spent the last decade winding up, and now their sole duty is to go buzzing along their allotted tracks generating headlines and excreting piles of gold for their backers. One feels distantly sympathetic but it does make them less than dazzling company. In fact, my mention of champagne just now reminds me that the only interesting thing I have learned in the last eighteen months of following in the dusty wake of the Flying Swede has nothing to do with him at all. Had you ever wondered why one of those famous houses like Moët et Chandon would permit what looks like a jeroboam of its Premier Cru Brut des Bruts to be shaken up and squirted to waste from a podium by spotty boys who clearly prefer Coke? Well, I have. It’s hardly an advertisement for the precious exclusivity of their product. I mean, "The Champagne

Reviews for Cooking with Fernet Branca

[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.

[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.

[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.

[pool_boy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not much 'story' but hilariously written.

[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!

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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 ...

[dwhapax · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Quite enjoyable, with two rascally narrators.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.