James Hamilton - Cooking with Fernet Branca

Review by Ro Bennett on show 8th Feb 2010.
Gerald Samper, a ghost writer for celebrities is renovating a house in a remote part of Tuscany. The estate agent assured him that the neighbouring house was occupied by a very quiet person for only two weeks of the year.
Gerald is also a foodie who loves concocting and cooking unusual recipes.

I started off by feeling sorry for him – he was interrupted whilst painting a ceiling by his neighbour bringing an ice breaking bottle of Fernet Branca which they drink.

Fernet Branca is a digestif, a type of bitters like Campari or Angustura Bitters.
First developed in Milan 1845, the recipe has been kept a secret by the family but includes various roots and herbs like myrrh, camomile, aloe, saffron and cardomom. It is 40% proof and costs about £22 a bottle which is why I have never sampled it!

So, Gerald and Marta knock back this bottle and she invites him to dinner.
He doesn’t want to go but reluctantly accepts. To put her off asking him again he makes Fernet Branca and Garlic ice cream to take as the dessert.
The way Gerald describes Marta makes her sound dreadful. He’s a snob and scathing, referring to her as a stocky, frizzy haired frump and he obviously regards her as some sort of ignorant peasant.

However the next section is written from Marta’s point of view. Then the book fluctuates between various situations seen from their different viewpoints and this is extremely funny.

For instance Gerald’s ice cream, which he hopes this will deter Marta from asking him to dinner again, is made from 4 tablespoons of double cream and 150 grams of sugar (5 ounces) of sugar ,15 cloves of garlic, and quarter pint of Fernet Branca!

However Marta describes the ice cream as a bit bland with a sort of wild herbal flavour and told her sister that Gerald got so drunk he polished most of it off.

It turns out that far from being a peasant, Marta’s from a land owning family in Voynovia, part of the former Soviet Union.
The Estate Agent sold her her house after telling her the same spiel. The problem for her is that Gerald sings opera very loudly and very badly as he works and this disrupts her concentration. She is a composer of film music
and been asked to write the score for a film by a famous Italian film producer, so Gerald’s singing and behaviour prove very distracting. None the less, she tries to be neighbourly by taking the bottle of Fernet Branca and inviting him to dinner.


The book is dotted with recipes I initially thought were genuine if a bit distasteful because the ingredients and method are all carefully written out:
How to make the Fernet Branca and Garlic ice cream, Otter with lobster sauce, Rabbit in Cep Custard Lychees on Toast and so on. Then I read the ingredients for Alien Pie and twigged - I hope - the recipes are a wind up.

As the book developed I liked Gerald less, whilst I found myself sympathizing with Marta, as more of her personality and details of her family and situation are revealed.
I enjoyed the book very much and found it very funny - a real page turner with lots of unexpected twists and turns amongst the humour.

Mainly good reviews:
5 stars on account of laughing at points until I cried. The two narrators give wildly diverging versions of encounters which are always oiled by a bottle of Fernet Branca. Both protagonsts are supremely disparaging in a long suffering way of (amongst their counterpart’s many other perceived failings) the other’s inability to hold their drink.

Then there’s this one:
When my book club decided to tackle a ‘funny book’ as a respite from Gide, Sagan, Murakami and Morrison, I put this forward as a suggestion. Swayed by the glowing reviews on the back cover and the fact that it had been Booker Longlisted, we decided to give it a go. It turned out to be a ghastly pastiche of Tom Sharpe crossed with Peter Mayle blah blah blah.
Poorly written it left a taste as foul as that of Fernet Branca, which in case you’ve never tried it, is vile and usually administered to relieve stomach upsets. We all needed a large glass to recover from this noisome book. Don’t even think about reading it. If I could give it minus stars as a rating I would.

Well I obviously have very poor taste because I really loved it!
Review by Ro Bennett