Among the many things for which there is no accounting — Enron being only the latest installment — taste brooks the least oversight. It confronts one with personal truths that, albeit undeniable, don't exist outside the confines of its proprietor's senses. Thus, for Gerald Samper, the protagonist of James Hamilton-Paterson's novel Cooking with Fernet Branca, mussels in chocolate or fish cake (a sweet mackerel torte with sugar icing) represent the pinnacle of haute cuisine — to which most of us would turn up our noses. Palatability aside, the recipes scattered throughout this satirical novel deliciously capture Gerry's character: pretentious, unctuous, and contemptible. That this windbag narrates the story, along with his Eastern European neighbor, would deter even the most dogged reader if the two weren't so hilarious.

The book is essentially an English comedy of manners nestled in the Tuscan hillside, where Gerry earns his living ghostwriting shallow books about shallower people. However, Samper is fond of singing Verdi arias and fancies himself a misunderstood artiste. Marta, his neighbor (and, inevitably, the object of his affection), is the daughter of a shady political figure in the fictitious Soviet-bloc country of Voynovia. She is, in fact, une artiste — a film-score composer whose latest project is with the famed Italian director Piero Pacini. Her side of the story — told partly through intelligent, insightful letters to her sister back home — is the less easily mocked of the pair. Gerald's tale, on the other hand, is filled with observations as misguided and humorously distasteful as his recipes. Hamilton-Paterson, though, really shines not in what he tells but in how he tells it — he captures perfectly the self-satisfied tone of the English ex-pat faffing about Italy.

Fernet Branca earns its keep in the title. The Italian liquor serves not only as the common ingredient in all of Samper's dilettantish recipes but also as a metaphor for Gerard and Marta's relationship. Although they both privately detest the elixir, they cheerfully slug it down behind the facade of bonhomie. Cooking with Fernet Branca might leave a bad taste in your mouth, but it is the perfect cocktail of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, and Julia Child.

-Joshua David Stein