“Cooking With Fernet Branca” is a delightful send-up of those travel/food books which usually involve someone staying at a lovely villa in Provence or Tuscany and meeting quirky characters and eating wonderful food. In this novel, an obnoxious but well-meaning English writer lives next door to a composer from a made up Eastern European country and they have misadventures involving really terrible recipes and drinking large amounts of Fernet Branca, which in my experience is an acquired taste (to say the least).

The Englishman cooks concoctions like “Lychees on Toast” in which he mashes anchovies into peanut butter with Tabasco sauce, and stuffs the mixture into lychee nuts. These lychees are then smothered with gorgonzola cheese on toast. The recipe is one of the only ones listed in the book that do not include smoked cat. While this delightfully bizarre book did not make me hungry, it did make me want to give the black and bitter Fernet Branca another try, and so I shall.