Cooking With Fernet Branca

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

Show More

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.

Show Less

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

Show More

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.

Show Less

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

Show More

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.

Show Less

I've been deep in P.G. Wodehouse land lately, listening to Right Ho, Jeeves and The Inimitable Jeeves while driving. These stories have been narrated before by well-knowns such as Hugh Laurie and Richard Briers, but a new-ish series has been published by Audible Partners. They feature the character

Show More

actor Jonathan Cecil whose superb talent makes you feel that you are listening to a cast of at least a couple of dozen as the foppish Bertie Wooster tackles braying aunts, mismatched lovers and arrogant French cooks. Cecil has brought new life to these old stories and has made my summer commute truly delightful.

So imagine my surprise when I picked up this 2004 Man Booker Prize-nominated book to find distinct parallels between Bertram Wooster and the snobby, often clueless "hero", Gerald Samper. Any doubts that Hamilton-Paterson was not channeling Wodehouse were dashed when I reached page 65:

"We Sampers bounce back. I have the piratical makings of a black eye ... but otherwise I am in fine if stiff fettle."

Unlike Bertie, Sampers doesn't have a private income. His small house in Tuscany was purchased by ghost writing biographies of callow entertainment and sports figures, a group he disdains. He also disdains his new neighbor, the stodgy Marta who hails from Voynovia, an Eastern European country, and interrupts his solitude with her music and offerings of disgusting delicacies from home.

Since this is a Bertie without a Jeeves, Gerald takes delight in his own inventive culinary creations. 'Lampreys in Sherry' ("1 kilo live young lampreys, not over a foot long") and 'Rabbit in Cep Custard' are two of the more tame recipes while others suggest cat meat and other revolting ingredients:

"Jack Russells are absolute buggers to bone, notoriously so, but yield a delicate, almost silky pate that seems to welcome the careworn diner with both paws on the edge of the table, as it were." In addition, each recipe is laced with a generous helping of the vile, 48 proof Italian liqueur called Fernet Branca.

So what we have here is a glorious send up of all those ex-pats extolling the virtues of transforming Tuscan piles into shangri-las and immersing themselves in cooking feasts to delight the eye and palate. The author has lived in Italy for years; acclaimed for many serious literary works, this is his first satirical novel, brought about no doubt by a reading of Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun and its clones.

But of course taking the mickey out of an overworked genre requires a plot too. A lot happens here and the two neighbors remain clueless about each other's motives as helicopters descend on them, and visits from an Italian film director and British pop singer add to the confusion. Marta provides her own version of the tale in alternating chapters and these two very unreliable narrators make assumptions about the same events in very different ways. The language barrier - and generous doses of Fernet Branca - convinces him that she is a slattern with designs on him while she thinks that this gay Englishman is laughably pathetic. It isn't until they realize that they both speak passable Italian that they begin to change their minds.

It's a wild ride and I laughed out loud many, many times. There are two sequels which I plan to read. But a warning: if you're serious about your food, revel in the sparkling travelogues about Tuscany and imagine yourself in Frances Mayes' luxurious Italian sandals one day, you might want to skip it.

Show Less

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

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

"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

Show More

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!

Show Less

Not much 'story' but hilariously written.

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

Show More

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.

Show Less

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

Show More

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 ...

Show Less

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

Show More

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.

Show Less

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.

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

Lychees on Toast

Ingredients
Lychees (tinned)
Olive oil
Peanut butter
Hard cheese
Toast
Anchovies
Tabasco sauce

A 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

Show More

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.

Show Less

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.

Show More

Gerald's idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former soviet republic. A series of hilarious misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity.

Show Less

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.

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

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

Show More

and there. Perhaps my funny bone is under the weather. Perhaps this just isn't the book for me.

Show Less

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

Show More

and there. Perhaps my funny bone is under the weather. Perhaps this just isn't the book for me.

Show Less

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

Show More

and there. Perhaps my funny bone is under the weather. Perhaps this just isn't the book for me.

Show Less

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.

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,"

Show More

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.

Show Less