Doctor Johnson’s excellent recipe for cucumber: ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.’ Some readers will doubtless cry, ‘But what about sandwiches?’ There is, as we are all aware, no accounting for taste.
Taste is a moot point for readers of James Hamilton-Paterson’s satire, Cooking with Fernet-Branca. Our feeble hero, Gerald Samper, lives on a Tuscan hilltop from which he looks despisingly down on ‘un-reddened Brits’ who flock to the lower slopes for their hols. Gerald considers himself a cut above the hoi polloi, but the joke is on him; he has fallen into the trap of thinking that only other people are tourists. He is a ghost writer for celebrities, and also fancies himself as a bit of a chef. One of his disgusting recipes every so often finds its way into the text: mussels in chocolate, garlic ice cream, otter with lobster sauce.
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