Cooking With Fernet Branca

tags: cooking, dark humor, Italy, satire

⭐⭐⭐⭐

from GoodReads

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 . . .

After reading while laughing out loud the funny Cookbook For Deplorables, I suddenly remembered the hilarious misadventures of Gerree Samper in Cooking With Fernet Branca. I read this book in 2005 and loved his absurd farcical relationship with Marta and vomit-inducing out of this world culinary inventions specially the Liver Ice Cream or Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream. Marta finds the flavor is herb-y but doesn't seem to notice the garlic. She is as weird as Gerald. BTW, Garlic Ice Cream is being sold in California if you want to have a taste. 

I reread it and still love it for its satiric take on travelogues/memoirs such as Peter Mayle's A Year In Provence, which I also loved, BTW. I absolutely agree with Gerald's spot on description of Tuscan bread. I baked the Tuscan-style bread in 2010 for a blogging community baking challenge. Gerald notes:

"There is something radically wrong with Tuscan bread. Frankly it's a disgrace: the one thing to disfigure an otherwise classic cuisine. Even Italians from other regions make ribald remarks about it - like for instance that it's the only bread in the world to emerge from the oven already stale."

The second and third books in the trilogy are equally witty with more of Gerald's acerbic humor and odd culinary experiments

Amazing Disgrace

Rancid Pansies (an anagram of Princess Diana)